WTF Is Going On?
All the pundits and scholars are trying to figure out these holy-shit times. The New York Times checks in with historians like Jay Winik and Timothy Snyder. CNN and MSNBC regularly check with Doris Kearns Goodwin (lose the bad wig!), Michael Beschloss (lose the shoe-polish hair dye!) and Douglas Brinkley. These historians all say we’re living through, um, “historic” times. Thanks for your insight! For the deepest insights, I read actual history books — or literature.
Last night I finished “Red Pill,” the latest novel by Indian-British writer Hari Kunzru, who now lives with his wife and two young children in Brooklyn. The novel is a timely, disturbing evocation of the growing political and psychological menace of our times. The protagonist of the novel, a New York writer with a febrile sense of the billowing danger around him, comes undone while attending a scholarly retreat in Berlin — in a historically haunted mansion on the shores of Lake Wannsee, near where the Final Solution was devised by the demonic visionaries of the Third Reich. Our narrator meets the mind-fucking creator of a popular TV show that glorifies the purging violence of rogue cops; he witnesses the refugee lives that await millions of us as the world’s social and environmental order collapses; he feels targeted by the billowing technological authoritarianism of our day. He stares into the abyss, and he loses it.
Near the end of “Red Pill,” our narrator is back in New York with his deeply worried wife and their young daughter, being pieced together by anti-psychotic drugs and a baby boomer-era shrink who doesn’t get it. He “thinks too much” — life is not so labyrinthine, the psychiatrist in “a long heavy skirt and silver Indian jewelry” blithely tells him. He tries to resist. “I told her that what she said might once have been true, but the internet had changed things. There were underground currents, new modes of propagation. It wasn’t even a question of ideas, not straight-forwardly, but feelings, atmospheres, yearnings, threats. What kind of threats, she wanted to know. Well, I said. A lot of people quibbled about terms, but essentially I was talking about Fascism… I saw that I had no hope of persuading her. She was too old, too insulated by her degrees and her shelves of books. I was being, she told me blandly, rather melodramatic about what was essentially a marginal set of ideas. We weren’t living in Weimar Germany.”
“Red Pill” concludes with a 20016 presidential election party where the liberal New Yorkers begin the evening quaffing Champagne and donning ironic party hats, but by the end have descended into a horror show. Late that night, as Trump slouches toward his Electoral College victory, the narrator lies awake in bed, clutching his wife and young daughter. It’s a stormy night in New York. “Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we have no choice but to let it in.”
And now, over four years later, the nightmare is finally over. Or is it? The “carnage” that Trump ferociously declared had taken over America really now is consuming us as his reign spits and crackles to its smoking end. Over 4,000 American a day still dying from the plague that he made worse; National Guardsmen with automatic weapons crowded into the marble grandeur of the Capitol; barking mad Congress members like Lauren Boebert of Colorado, yelling shrilly that “I call bull crap on Democrats” during yesterday’s impeachment “debate,” like some emotionally distraught high schooler.
Let’s stick with Boebert for a moment — because no matter what now happens to Trump, political leaders like Boebert and the Americans they represent aren’t going anywhere. Before winning her upset Congressional victory, Boebert ran a restaurant in rural Colorado where she encouraged her waiters to openly carry guns. Just because. She has expressed sympathies for the bizarre beliefs of the QAnon cult. While Capitol security anxiously rushed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to a secure location during the January 6 violent invasion, Boebert tweeted news of her escape. “Today is 1776,” Boebert crowed on the bloody day in Washington. Instead of hiding away Boebert during the impeachment proceedings yesterday — perhaps with her legal team to prepare her own defense against sedition and incitement charges — the Republican leadership in the House gave her an on-camera platform to air her ravings.
So, yes, I’m afraid the carnage will not end on January 20. I will celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and that of Kamala Harris. But we all have to sleep lightly these nights. The wind is still howling and scratching at our window.
Postscript: You needn’t bother with Kunzru’s meandering, confusing essay about our fraught times in the current Harper’s. His fiction gets much deeper into the American malaise than his journalism.
