The premise underlying the slogan “Make America Great Again” is that America is bad and needs fixing. This insistence defies facts and most people’s experience. Does anyone really want to revert to the Golden Age of the Fifties, with its sexism, racism, poverty, fears and diseases? Many of us, I for one, would be dead now if born a generation sooner. Sure, some things were better then; other things appear to have been better, viewed through the rose-colored glasses of retrospect. But I’m guessing most folks would hesitate before boarding a time-machine to relocate to an earlier era.
Why do so many Americans trash America? Shouldn’t we want to feel good about our home? Many singing the song “Proud to be an American” are emphatically not. Why this rage?
Feelings about the exterior world are dictated by feelings about ourselves. If we’re happy the sun shines brightly; if glum, it scorches. Old people get cranky because their bones ache and hopes mock. We blame on our shoes the faults of our feet.
Why do so many Americans feel bad about themselves? We’re disappointed. Our consumer culture convinced us better things would bring better living and a rising tide would lift all boats. Technology and science were supposed to make life a breeze. Having been promised happiness, we feel shortchanged, cheated, dissed. The superrich are doing fine, with their skyboxes and Venetian weddings, but what about the rest of us? Science, by lengthening our lives, has multiplied our woes. Foreigners are taking away our jobs; sexual deviants confusing our young. Snooty Ivy League elites sneer at blue-collar patriots. The nerve of the bosses, to assign us to an underclass. Damn right we’re pissed.
Happiness is a bullshit goal. We never get there because, by definition, it’s beyond our grasp. Who doesn’t have their gripes and regrets? Satisfaction is an easier reach. We did OK, all things considered. Our results could have been worse.
Observers have been puzzled by the objectives of the MAGA movement and their swaggering leader. What sort of America are they aiming for? What’s their big idea?
They have none. No more than teenagers in a tantrum have thought through the consequences of their destruction. They break for the sake of breaking. Vengeance delights, at least for now. Burn, baby, burn.
Fires burn themselves out, leaving cinders. Rampant teens wake to the realization that they’ve made their world worse, not better, by their revolt. The policies of the Nameless One – if you can call them that – will leave Americans poorer, sicker, weaker, gloomier than before. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
The extent of the destruction wrought by the MAGA revolution is anybody’s guess. The costs are already staggering and the bills are just coming due. We may lose democracy and all our freedoms. Recovery will be painful, slow, and incomplete.
Could this calamity have been averted? On the eve of our first civil war, Senator Seward of New York, later Lincoln’s Secretary of State, foresaw the coming confrontation as “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.” This one too, I suspect. An angry underclass rises against its supposed betters, aided and goaded by the plutocrats they should most resent. No one wins in the end, but amidst battle one’s concern is victory, not eventualities. Kill first and afterward, blinking, dazed, wonder why. So sad.
The way to happiness is never to seek or expect it but to keep so busy doing one hasn’t time to reflect. Engagement defeats estrangement. These days who has time to be sad? We’ve got a war to fight.