The headlines today are horrifying. The Washington Post reports that “Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks" and “Six people presumed dead after Baltimore Key Bridge collapses, Coast Guard says." The New York Times reports (https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/27/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf): “Major Baltimore Bridge Collapses, Struck by Ship” and two deaths in a New York City subway. The Associated Press has stories on the bridge collapse, war and famine in Gaza, an ex-president selling bibles to raise money f
or his defense in various criminal and civil court cases, and the climate: “783 million people face chronic hunger. Yet the world wastes 19% of its food, UN says."
It is a time when we are inundated with a steady drumbeat of bad news. Regional wars. Spreading autocracy. Failing infrastructure.
The Supreme Court is in the hands of far-right extremists and will be for the foreseeable future.
Public universities are under attack, particularly their humanities departments.
Even the economy, which has been growing, feels broken, with inflation eating away at the wage gains many have received over the last few years.
There is homelessness. Hunger. Poverty. In numbers that should embarrass a nation that purports to have a growing economy.
My urge is to quote Joan Didion, to say that the “center was not holding,” to quote her seminal essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which details a moment in history when our nation, when the world, was atomized. Broken.
“It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled,” she writes.
And yet, in 1966 and 1967, when she reports and writes this essay, the United States “was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege.” But it was a nation tearing at itself, suffocating under the weight of an illegal and immoral war, and a backlash against the gains finally being made by Blacks, women, and others, a backlash that was most evident among middle-class and working-class Whites. Even with a growing stock market and expanding economy, there was a “the uneasy apprehension that it was not” a moment “of brave hopes and national promise.” “All that seemed clear,” she says, “was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job.”
I sometimes feel this way now. That we have butchered the job. That the world we have created and will be leaving behind is badly damaged, and that the damage will be difficult to root out, to fix. It is the increasing horrors visited upon us by climate change, but also the backlash from a population cohort unwilling to cede any of their power, to share, and who have turned to a cartoon-like wannabe autocrat as their leader and avatar. It is a political system that has allowed two calcified and failing parties to manage our government and economy, and that has refused to acknowledge that the systems we have relied on have ceased to function the way we have been taught to expect.
Didion, at the time she writes “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” can still be described as a Goldwater Republican — which she described in the forward to Political Fictions as the “logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative California Republicans … in a post-war boom economy” (7).
The people which whom I grew up were interested in low taxes, a balanced budget, and a limited government, They believed above all that a limited government had no business tinkering with the private or cultural life of its citizens.
Her background allowed her to function as a surrogate for the readers of The Saturday Evening Post, and to approach her subject with a sense of intellectual distance, which was underscored by her writing style, which was spare and avoided the kind of hyperbole injected into discussion of the hippies and the counterculture by mainstream sources like Time magazine, which viewed the scene in the Haight with a sense of horror and condescension.
Didion details a movement of dispossessed youth, many assembling in San Francisco, dropping out, dropping acid, and viewing themselves as a kind of vanguard of a new age. Didion writes of the lives and fascinations of these dispossessed kids and young adults. Many just children. Teens. Of their coalescing around a culture of drugs — pot, hash, LSD, meth, heroin — some falling prey to the worst of it, many exploring a new, but false, sense of belonging. A cohort victimized by the shifting sensibilities and changing rules. The center has not held, she tells us, but it is not the fault of these children, of the post-war generation. They did not create the world in which they were expected to live, or start the war in which they were being ordered to die. They are victims. But their victimhood is going to have long-term consequences.
At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb.
I’ve read this essay probably a dozen times, reacting differently each time I’ve read it. But I taught the essay last night as part of a pair of units on two deep-reporting and the first-person narrative. As I read the news today, the discussion we had about Didion and the historical context for “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” echoed. Backlash. Disruption. The inability of people not just to agree but to even speak the same political language — on abortion, on Israel and Palestine, on the election, or the meaning of free speech or academic freedom.
The sixties, of course, were quite different, thanks to a confluence of cultural and social changes, and the slaughter taking place in Vietnam. The sense of hope that began the decade and that was dashed by war and assassination might make it feel like a coming of age. A national lurch into adulthood. But the decades that followed undercut this sense, makes me think that we moved from that false sense of hope into a kind of mass dementia, a mass disconnection from reality.
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — like The Velvet Underground, early electric Dylan, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, and 2001: A Space Odyssey — capture the ugly underbelly of American society, the contradictions in the counterculture and the larger contradictions in the American psyche.
Today, politically, we are mired in bad choices — choices that reflect different visions, one built on a cult of personality and a desire to enter a mythic past that never existed and another that also looks back, but only because it lacks the ability to imagine something truly better.
Culturally, we’ve given up. We’ve ceded all control of our intellectual and artistic selves to the marketplace and technology, allowing the corporations who run or fund out institutions to make decisions for us about what is good, bad, or even acceptable.
And our responses have been different. Restrained. There has been no mass movement to abandon society. No expansive counterculture. There is political organizing, a rebirth of unions, a sense of politics that is probably more realistic and more mature.
Didion’s use of Yeats as epigraph points to a cultural shift, but elides a line — “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” — that seems to sum up her essay. I wonder about that elision, especially as it relates to the moment in which we are struggling. Our innocence is long gone, wiped away by official deceit, political assassination, and petty self-interest. And I am reminded of a different poem:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.