Category: Contemporary Fiction

“The New Earth” and the 1970s

I have just finished reading the novel, The New Earth, by Jess Row. In many ways it is a mess of a book. About a dysfunctional family, one that the novel overburdens with not one trauma, but five. I won’t list them to avoid spoiling your reading pleasure. But let’s just say that it’s three traumas too many. And there is a jejune bit of meta-fiction (or postmodernist high jinks) running through the book, in which “the novel” announces its requirements in ways that add nothing to the impact or import of the novel.

That’s because, as is usually the case, the novel’s excellence comes from its portrayal of an array of characters and the ways in which they strive to navigate life in the United States from 1970 to the era of Trump. (There are some masterful meta-fictions in which character and mundane observation play no role. So I am not saying it can’t be done. But it is very hard to pull off, and most excellent novels do what novels have always done, dissect society through the travails of individual characters.)

To be clear: The New Earth is the best novel I have read recently. I highly recommend it, flaws and all.

A loud despair runs through Row’s book; by its end, the three children of the family have declared the US unlivable—and take their father off with them into exile. In one way, that’s why the multiple traumas are too much. We don’t need over the top horrors to understand why people suffer in the contemporary US. Enough to register the cruelties of everyday life—and the helplessness many of us feel about doing anything to remedy them. The most sympathetic of the novel’s characters is the daughter who works as a lawyer trying to help terrified immigrants in Trump’s America. We see how she is overwhelmed, with far too many cases than she could ever effectively handle, and fighting a judicial bureaucracy that even when it is not being deliberately cruel (which happens often enough) is battered into indifference by also being overburdened.

In short, the novel is just about the best account I have read of the pain and fear that comes from living in the contemporary world. The family’s other daughter joins a peace group trying to protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers, so the horrors are not confined to the US.

Not surprisingly, the novel has nothing to offer in the way of solutions—except finding a separate peace. The characters leave the US in search of that peace, hiding out from history as it were, and tending to their own gardens.

Which leads me to the 1970s. The parents of the dysfunctional family spend a fraught few years in the middle 70s in a Vermont commune presided over by a Japanese Zen master. The novel does a marvelous job capturing the spirit of the 70s—which was a decade of separate peace making. The failures of the revolutionary, transformative hopes of the 60s yielded the small-scale, personalized experiments of the 70s. I know that’s a cliché, but Row makes it take on flesh. The search for alternatives was real—and while never a mass movement, it did motivate a fairly large sub-culture.

And Row’s novel ponders why it all fell apart. Why, as if determined to show Margaret Thatcher was right when she declared there are no alternatives, a belief in other ways of living, in an ability to create and sustain those other ways, just dissipated, leaving nary a trace behind. It all just disappeared: the hope, the experiments, the conviction that mainstream society was not just cruel, but fully and truly insane. The determination to have no part in that insane society–and the various ways people actually acted on that determination. Not some fantasy of moving to Canada, but setting out to establish communities where a different life could be lived and sustained. The novel’s ending–with its surviving characters going into exile–both reprises the 70s despairing conclusion that only a separate peace is possible with the added despair of not even believing one can, with friends, create the place of that separate peace. No running away to create a community, just running away, is all we can manage to imagine (and sometimes, although rarely, do) in the 2020s. After all, how many people really do move to Canada?

I graduated from college in 1974 and immediately started grad school in the fall of that year. I didn’t know anyone who was dropping out to pursue some utopian alternative. My fellow students at Georgetown were disappointedly conventional and conservative. No doubt most of them voted for Reagan a few years down the road. The atmosphere at Buffalo was entirely different. I had traded conservative kids from Northeastern Catholic high schools for Jewish grad students, a surprising number of whom were “red diaper” babies. From being just about the most radical kid on campus in DC, I went to being a boring middle-of-the-roader in upstate NY.

Grad school in Buffalo during those years was a mess; apparently its teetering on the edge of anarchistic chaos was the after effect of its actually having been mired in anarchistic chaos in the years from 1968 to 1972. A kind of fragile order had been restored, but there was still a lot of pulling in various contradictory directions, basically filling the whole spectrum from the Trotskyite Sparticus revolutionaries to the careerist academics on the faculty and in the grad student ranks. The careerists were on the defensive and a distinct minority in Buffalo. It wasn’t until I got to Berkeley in 1977 that I encountered true academic careerism in all its tedium and stuffiness. The kind of place where people would not venture an opinion because something “was not in their field” and where obsession with the “profession’s” pecking order, both locally and nationally, was as pronounced as any minor Austen character’s constantly reaching for his Debrett’s.

All of this to say that in Buffalo one could imagine that academics was itself an alternative. Having one’s cake and eating it too. Certainly that was the case for me. After all, I ended up in Buffalo halfway by mistake. I would have gone to Yale or Cornell if they would have had me. I did know that Buffalo was at the forefront of “theory”—in which I was interested. But I would have gone to deadly conservative Minnesota if they had given me a better stipend. So I wandered into the Buffalo anarchy with only the dimmest idea of what I was getting into.

But I had been reading the various radical tracts of the 60s—Marcuse, N. O. Brown, Charles Reich, Philip Slater. So I did have the image of books that could intervene in the here and now, that were promoting alternatives, that were paving the way toward a transformed world. So I was primed already to think I was preparing myself to be a similar kind of prophet, one who mobilized ideas to move the world forward.

I think it is that image of an audience that meant I could never have fled into a commune. Prudence no doubt also played a huge part. I wanted/needed a job, a sinecure if you will. Already in 1974 the American Philosophical Society was warning prospective graduate students that their job prospects were iffy. A professor of mine at Georgetown ran into me the summer of 1974. When he learned I was going to grad school, he advised me to learn a trade—carpentry or electricity—along the way, so I would have something to fall back on. A far different take (and a more refreshing one) than my encounter in 1978 with one of the Berkeley professors I had gotten to know. I told him I was doing adjunct work for $900 a course at the University of San Francisco while I looked for a tenure track job. What kind of tenure track job, he asked. In my dreams, a liberal arts college. Well, he replied, have you contacted Reed?

Back to prudence. I couldn’t step off the pier into the unknown of a commune. But I also couldn’t do it because I wanted to address the world. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted an audience. So I needed to believe (and it proved, eventually, approximately true) that the academy would afford me the freedom and autonomy and financial means to do my own thing, to pursue what interested me and what I thought should interest (and influence) others. There was a long apprenticeship, with freedom only coming after tenure, but the academy did deliver something like an alternative way of living—even if the dreams of influencing others, of contributing to a transformation of America life, did not (could not?) come to fruition.

Thus, my own 1970s hopes were dashed; the robust goals of dramatic change scaled back to the miniature spaces of the classroom and the family. Even my efforts at transforming academic culture came to naught. I spent most of my academic career at UNC trying to break the strangleholds of departments and of individually conducted research in how the university organized itself and how faculty experienced their careers. To no avail. Nothing I did in that regard had even a minimal impact.

True, UNC is a particularly conservative place. True interdisciplinary structures and fantastic collaborative work have been introduced and have flourished in other places. But I couldn’t get UNC to move in those directions. I had plenty of co-conspirators (so my use of “I” here is misleading), but we failed.

In other words, I ended up with my own separate peace. I had a more than satisfactory career, in terms of loving my students and the classes I taught, in terms of writing what I wanted to write to the best of my abilities, in terms of the respect and regard of my students and colleagues. But nothing I did made any difference in terms of providing alternatives to the way life is organized and lived in the US. I could only watch—as so many of my generation did—while the dominant mode (call it “neoliberalism” if you will; I have called it “the return of ruthless capitalism”) only tightened its grip on every corner of the world.

That tightening grip somehow—and this is where Row’s novel is very strong—also obliterated the pockets of alternative communes and their like. Somehow? After all, what threat were a few scattered dissident communities, far from the mainstream, tiny in their numbers and their power? Yet they, too, had to be driven into the maw. Swallowed whole and made extinct.

How? Part of the story is the inflation of the late 1970s. It is hard to convey to people today how cheap life was in the early 70s. My grad stipend was $270 a month; if you were paying $75 a month for rent in Buffalo in 1974, you hadn’t looked hard enough. If you had no income, no steady job, you couldn’t expect raises that at least took inflation into account even if lagging behind. Things that could be done for almost no money in 1972 (like finding a place in the country and scraping by on what you could grow and casual labor) were impossible by 1978. Poverty—real, soul and body destroying poverty—drove people off the communes as the decade unfolded.

There were multiple other causes as well. But I want to return—and end—with this question of audience. The communes were always, to some extent, demonstration projects. They were meant to prove to a skeptical world (which, in reality, might shrink down to skeptical parents and other family members) that an alternative was possible. But you couldn’t go into a commune unless you also had very strong ties to your fellow communards; they were the audience you were most cathected to.

That’s where I didn’t have it. I was cathected to the imaginary audience of readers. Those were the people I wanted to address. I had turned my back on my parents, had succeeded to a large extent in not caring a whit if they approved of what I was doing or not. We didn’t share any values by that point; they were Catholic Goldwater Republicans. My only retained inheritance from them was a strong commitment and emotional attachment to monogamy. I had no interest in or sympathy for 70s sexual experimentation or revolution, although very sympathetic with both feminism and the gay liberation movement.

In any case, I was not attached to a local audience or community. The lack of such ties meant setting off into the woods with a small group of like-minded others was never a possibility for me. But, inevitably, the courage and romance of that attracts my admiration. And the failure of those efforts both disheartens and intrigues me. Why couldn’t they by sustained? And why, today, have we gotten to the point where such utopian efforts don’t even exist any more? A total loss of hope—and of vision—and of deep attachments to a cadre of others.

We are thrown back on the family—or on church communities. There is almost nothing else in the way of lived solidarities out there. Especially if we think of institutional supports for those solidarities. Yes, there are networks of friends, but never organized into ways of life, or (perhaps more radically) ways of sustaining life, of securing the basic necessities. For that, you must go to the market; you can’t provide them for yourself through a small-scale collaboration with friends.

That’s what the demise of the 70s spirit means. Experiments are no longer even tried. Everyone buckles under to the imperatives of the marketplace and to the intolerances of a society that scorns all alternatives and punishes those who, for whatever reason, cannot manage or refuse to bow to the demands of the market. A society that visits the economic sins of the fathers on their offspring, making it well nigh impossible to climb out of the pit of poverty.

So, yes, I miss the 70s with its sense of possibilities. I was mostly a by-stander to, not a participant in, its experiments, which does seem a lamentable prudence. But I was a fellow traveler in the sense of being a sympathizer. I wanted the experimenters to succeed. I hated the inevitable smug “I told you so” that followed the multiple failures. I could mostly overlook the experimenters’ excesses and their often ludicrous rhetoric in order to honor their courage in trying to forge a new path. And I can feel very melancholy when I read a novel like “The New Earth” and experience afresh the hopes that drove so many 70s alternatives and the eventual crushing of those hopes.

Change, Violence, and Innocence

Two passages from two different novels by Salman Rushdie.

The first from Quichotte:

“After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what the person—previously peacable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option” (339).

The psychology of violence, how it can be committed and why so many turn to it, has been a puzzle I have returned to again and again over the past forty years, without ever getting anything close to a solution that satisfied me. That violence is contagious seems indisputable; that people become inured to violence is demonstrated by the behavior of soldiers in wartime; that much violence stems from an enraged self-righteousness also seems true. But what has eluded me is how one commits the act itself—the plunging of the knife into another’s body, the pulling of the trigger of the gun whose barrel sits in one’s own mouth. That seems non-human, which is perhaps why violence is often outsourced as bestial but also divine (Charles Taylor’s “numinous violence.”) I don’t say Rushdie’s thought here is the answer, but it seems very shrewd to me, focusing in on the dehumanization that underlies the ability to act violently, while also highlighting the ways in which violence is done by those to whom violence has been done. A curse handed down in various ways through time.

The second from Golden House:

“When I looked at the world beyond myself I saw my own moral weakness reflected in it. My parents had grown up in a fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear, the last moment of politics without religion, but somehow their years in the fairy tale had grounded them, strengthened them, given them the conviction that by their own direct action they could change and improve the world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of the spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trust-in-me Snake. Whereas horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it” (188).

I always want to resist narratives of lost innocence—or of ancestors whose strength and virtues we cannot hope to reproduce. Lost innocence is in many ways the favorite American narrative, and it will play us as false as narratives about a lost greatness. Yet Rushdie’s list of what we have lost resonates with me. I graduated from college in 1974, into the gas crisis recession that started the ball rolling away from full employment and endless, inescapable precarity. I turned 30 in 1983, just as AIDS appeared over the horizon and put an end to the promiscuity of the 1970s, my 20s. And the emergence of the religious right in the Reagan triumphs of the 1980s was a shock to those of us who had assumed we lived in the secular world of the modern. In short, the three things Rushdie lists were actual and momentous changes, registered (at least by me) in the moment. The kind of thing that history throws at you—and you discover you are powerless to thwart.

To discover one’s powerlessness is to lose a kind of innocent optimism, a faith that things can be made better. But let’s not get carried away in either direction. Life in 1955 America was terrible for blacks and gays, as J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy reigned. That things in 2022 are better for blacks and gays is the result of hard, persistent political work. We are never fully powerless, even if we are also never in the clear. The forces of reaction are never annihilated. The gains made yesterday can always be lost tomorrow. The struggle is never decided once and for all in either direction. 2022 is better for gays and blacks than 1955, but in various ways worse than 2012.

And it didn’t take the 1980s to teach us lessons in powerlessness. The US waged a pointless and cruel war in Vietnam that millions of protesters were powerless to stop. Nothing seemed capable of knocking the military-industrial complex off its keel, and the logic of doubling down on bad decisions, of not losing face, led the government to lie, spy on domestic dissenters, and pile violence upon violence. History’s imperviousness to efforts to divert its floods coming at us from upriver is always ready to humble naïve political projects and hopes.

Still, it is important to note changes. It is not just the same old same old. Plus ça change and all that shrugging of the shoulders cynicism never has an accurate grasp of facts on the ground. The terms of the struggle shift. To take just one example: capitalism today is not the same as capitalism in 1955 or even 1990. It is organized very differently, while the alignment of forces for and against various of its manifestations has also shifted dramatically. Similarly, the obstacles blacks face in America today are very different from those they faced in 1955, and somewhat different from those faced in 1990.

So I think Rushdie does name three crucial things that did change in my lifetime, as someone who was just a bit too young to really live through the 60s (I was a freshman in high school in 1967), and for whom the 1970s and early 1980s were the truly formative years, the time of my coming into my own, picking my head up and actually getting a view of how this world I was entering was configured. The loss of economic security was evident immediately in the way I and my classmates navigated the years after college. No security assumed; it was going to be dog eat dog. And the glee with which Reagan and his ilk embraced that inhuman and dehumanizing competition was appalling. Especially when that cruelty was wrapped in the pieties of a Christianity that saw the sufferings of the poor as their just desert.

I was mostly a bystander to the promiscuity—both hetero- and homo- –of the 70s. But a bystander in fairly close proximity to both of those worlds. Some of its was tawdry, some of it exploitative (the abuse of unequal hierarchical relationships was rampant). But there was also a joyousness that has been lost. Not having sex always be a serious business has things to recommend it. All the studies indicate that young people today (caught in the evermore insecure world of precarity) are having much less sex than my generation did at their age. And I really can’t see that as a good thing. Sex under the right conditions is one of the great goods of life. It is a mark of our human perversity that we can also manage to turn it to evil so often and (apparently) so effortlessly.

When Rushdie’s narrator contemplates his parents’ faith that humans are moral and by striving can make a better world, he ends up demurring:

“And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most” (152).

This is Rushdie’s valediction to a certain form of hopeful liberalism, a form he thinks was only made possible by the Trentes Glorieuses, those thirty halcyon years (ignoring Vietnam, Korea, and the violences of decolonization) in the West following the second World War. I, of course, still want to hold on to that hopeful liberalism, to its vision of a social democracy that does its utmost to deliver to all a life now reserved to the privileged.

Rushdie’s narrator’s viewpoint is echoed in one of the book’s epigraphs, which itself echoes the currently fashionable academic preoccupation with ways of living in the ruins. The passage is taken from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road to the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

Giving in to a notion of a necessarily ruined world, about which we can do nothing except try to carve out a “little habitat,” a way to keep on keeping on, seems defeatist to me. But forging such a separate peace is also deeply alluring since the general madness and cruelty are so relentless and so resistant to alteration.

Rachel Kushner

I have recently read Rachel Kushner’s novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers. They are both compelling reads. Telex is more coherent, telling the story of Castro’s take-over of Cuba, mostly from the perspective of Americans living and working in Cuba at the time. The narrative evokes both the blindness of those Americans to what is happening—and the nostalgia for pre-Castor Cuba (and their lives there) that afflicts these Americans after they return to the States.

The Flamethrowers is a mess. The story wanders all over the place, with various characters and incidents offered up with no subsequent follow through. But is it always interesting. In its second half, it wanders into narrating radical (and violent) political action, specifically the Italian Red Brigade of the 1970s and their kidnappings and executions of business executives. The narrative voice during this section of the novel is curiously disengaged. It is not best described as a recording of the events that refuses to suggest any stance (moral or emotional) to them. Rather, there is a kind of unreality about the whole narration, as if (without ever explicitly stating this) the events are presented as an unbelievable fiction, as a visit to an alternative world neither the narrator nor her readers could actually credit. It’s like the play violence of a video game rather than violence that is actually experienced as a shock or a grim fact. There is something pro forma about these sections of the novel, as contrasted to the tale of the heroine’s experiences in the first half. Adding to this effect is the fact that the heroine walks away from the violence in Italy (in which she has become entangled) with little to no discernible effect on her life or attitudes. It’s as if it didn’t happen.

The violence in Telex is not sidestepped in the same way. Maybe it’s because we are dealing with a successful revolution—and with a civil war that saw wide-spread violence on both sides. In any case, Telex contends with the issue of the ways violence is utilized in political struggles—and with the divide between those willing (able?) to deploy violence in cold-hearted, “calculated” ways and those to whom violence is beyond the pale (for whatever emotional or moral reasons).

The following passage leads me to think about the connection between meaning and “the deliberate.” Obviously, we can do things that convey meanings we never intended to convey. But there are also cases where we very carefully set out to communicate something, to insure that what we do or say is fraught with meaning. Cases where we take special care to see that our meaning gets across. Kushner ties this heightened attention to meaning to certain acts of violence, ones that can be deemed “rhetorical,” through a speech given by the character La Maziere to a group of Castro’s guerillas after they have captured two of the counter-revolutionary forces.

“Executions, La Maziere continued, his voice rising to be sure everyone heard, was an act of intent, purpose, and exactitude. Assassination was a far lower act, an act of opportunity, or worse, ‘necessity’—a word he said as if it were a soiled, smelly rag he held between two fingers. Execution was a ritualized killing, he emphasized. It was never, ever, an act of necessity. It was always an act of choice, a calculated delivery of justice. And only by the elevated loft of choice, he explained, could the act of killing take on symbolic meaning. Killing, he said, had meaning, voluptuous and mystical meaning that should never be squandered. An execution was a rhetorical weapon, a statement that could not be disproved, just as a man could not be restored from death” (pg. 232 of Telex from Cuba).

Meaning is enhanced by ritual, by the elaborate staging/demonstration of deliberate choice, and by full publicity, full openness to view.

Ben Lerner (2)

Floating beneath the surface in Lerner’s 10:24 is a longing for connection, for art’s communicative possibilities to open up a pathway to community.

“[I] felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I look at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurablity of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate register, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. . . . [W]henever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of this possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down by the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event” (108-109).

The theme returns in a short lecture given by the narrator at a round-table featuring three writers. He has explained how the Challenger disaster and its aftermath (a poetic speech by Ronal Reagan, the rash of anonymously generated jokes about the event that circulate through the culture) set him on the road to becoming a writer.

“If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ [a poem Reagan quotes in his speech] as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting in the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t even funny at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammars the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all” (115-116).

The wistfulness here reminds me of John Lennon’s Imagine—and seems tied to the author’s (and our?) inability to access Whitmanian mysticism with any conviction. The skyline is a monument to collectivity. It could never have been built except by many human hands working in concert. And even if the various activities encompassed by city life—“bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity” (108)—are “bad forms of collectivity” they are “figures” of the possibility of collectivity. Selves share the “meanings” by which “we build a social world.” The boundaries between selves are utterly porous; we dissolve into one another—and into the stories that we share, the images that guide us. If only we could tweak those facts, shift them slightly on their axes—then the world and each one of us would be “the same but a little bit different” (a formula for utopia that comes from Benjamin or Brecht or someone of that ilk; I can’t find the exact source).

We always already exist in collectivities; the struggle is to make them better, to make them serve our deepest longings rather than to stifle and frustrate them. We fight collectivity (cling to selfishness in all its senses) even as we long for it. Art is connected to that longing; think of how movies and plays move us to tears, even those of us who almost never cry in “real life.” We only indulge our longings in the safe space of art, while living our prudent, advantage-seeking, lives in the everyday world. We know—as Adorno says—what our better selves and a better world look like, and we live out the shame (no matter how deeply we manage to bury it) of the gap between that vision of the good and the sordid realities we inhabit and reproduce.

The web of shared meanings is what we might call “myth”—and what is frightening about the current moment in American history is that the prevailing “myth” is no longer shared. (Probably it never was; more likely is that those who held alternative visions were more ruthlessly silenced in the past.) There are two (at least) utterly incompatible set of meanings circulating through the culture—and they appear so incompatible that the proponents of each find it close to unimaginable to share the national space with the other side.

In a sense, the power of art has never been so dramatically on display. The left/liberal vision occupies the lion’s share of official culture, from the high art bastions of museums and universities to the culture industry’s popular music, film, and TV. But the unofficial, unsanctioned world of the internet has spawned the alternative vision of the populist right, which now has its spokesperson in the White House. Fed by a not inaccurate understanding of its exclusion from “respectable” opinion, populism has developed its alternative modes of communication alongside its refusal to credit anything the official world has to say.

Communication, “spin,” how and to whom facts and meanings are articulated, command the field. Only catastrophic natural events—the virus, hurricanes, wildfires—seem capable of breaking through the morass of words and images, and not in any definitive, unequivocal way. That supposed objective barometer of facts on the ground—the market—has proved as fictitious (if not more) than other “social indicators.” Printing money and piling up debt have become disconnected from any actual consequences. Inflation remains low, faith in government bonds remains unshaken, the stock market indices remain high. We do appear to have left a reality-based world far behind.

And yet. There is so much real and remediable suffering out there. How did we, the human race, manage to turn all our possibilities, all our astounding capacities, into shit? Collectively, we have built an amazing world. But it amazes far more often by its byzantine dysfunctions than its praise-worthy accomplishments. We can work wonders in medicine, but have developed a bureaucracy for delivering medical care that creates massive amounts of spiritually deadening labor and places obstacles in the way of getting treatment to those in need of it. We can feed seven billion people through our farming practices, but have built a system with perverse incentives that lead to the destruction of food while people go hungry and encourages the depletion of the natural sources of agricultural productivity. We spend billions of dollars on military hardware, but claim we can’t afford to help the 20% of children who live in poverty.

I have always disliked Lennon’s Imagine. It seems so removed from actual engagement, so enchanted with its own melancholy. I find Lerner’s wistfulness more substantial. He more fully articulates the sense of being both outside and inside of the collective failure. Outside of it because seemingly unable to effect its unfolding disasters in any way—and outside of it because viewing it from a perspective that makes one unable to take its madness for granted or as inevitable or as immune from harsh judgment. Inside because one is fully engorged by this whale; one can’t pretend not to be a participant, day in and day out, as one struggles to construct a life, a way of negotiating through this minefield. Coming to terms with the devil is what we do even if we dream of living otherwise. Driving one’s car, paying one’s insurance and tax bills to underwrite inhumane systems, consuming then throwing away plastic. The list of contributions we make toward perpetuating the world as currently constituted is endless.

Stop the world, I want to get off. Whitman’s optimism is no longer available, even if his dreams are. Lerner returns to Whitman later in the book and wonders about the “ecstasy” that runs through Whitman’s encounters with wounded Union soldiers in the hospitals in Washington DC. There is something inhuman, deeply disturbing, in how Whitman gets off on the sight of these suffering bodies. Optimism in such circumstances is reprehensible—and seems linked to an ideology of “glorious sacrifice” that was, I would hope, finally put to rest by World War I.

Where to find that optimism today? Clearly, some people find in the collectivities created by the demonstrations that have become a recurrent feature of American civil life in 2020. Insofar as the demonstrations attempt to construct—and make stick—a counter-narrative, a vision of American society antithetical to the racism and division Trump wants to amplify, the battle is on. It is a war of meanings, and a war between an inclusive vision of collectivity against a divisive one. Lerner articulates for us the forlorn, but still deeply felt, longing for that inclusive collectivity (the beloved community) even as he reminds us that art (if understood in the widest possible sense) is where articulation takes place, where the meanings we hope to share are first presented. We can never quite believe that Shelley was right about poets being the unacknowledged legislators, but it is less incredible to recognize how the arts are powerful creators of community—and of the shared meanings that hold communities together.