How To Gaslight a Nation

Spotify told me at the end of last year that my most-played song was Crowded Table by The Highwomen, which seemed a little ironic considering that our table has been set for a maximum of 4 throughout. But our background music is often a balm for what we’re missing or need, an emotional cohesion between what’s happening in our lives and our hopes or fears. It’s why we belt out heartbreak songs along a ribbon of highway even when we’re currently in a perfectly happy, supportive relationship and why certain songs bring us straight back to 1995 and high school friends’ hot concrete summer-sun driveways (looking at you here, Coolio and Weezer with a side of Warren G). Because at some point, we’ve been there. At some point, our hearts swelled or broke with those chords. We have an emotional flexibility that allows us to feel the highs and lows of our previous selves and of others’ through soundtracks.

I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions over time. I’m not sure if my tally is higher or lower than an average Jane of my age and background, but I can certainly tick a few off. Some had exceptional consequences. Some had less. Getting married young to a grifter? Not awesome. Getting dropped off by an airport bus in the center of Rome with nothing but a backpack and a passport? Could have gone very wrong. Turned out fine. We create resilience by recovering from poor decisions. We pick ourselves up and thereby understand what it’s like to have been down.

I have been incredibly fortunate to luck into a few really good things, to have escaped the worst in a few others and to have worked really hard to fix a few of the bigger mess-ups. Through a combination of stupidity, luck and hard work, I’m a solidly middle-class American with a mortgage, a family, a job that pays my bills and an expectation of a few weeks’ vacation time. I like to think of myself as a fairly progressive world citizen, but I admit that I have some caricatures of the non-Western world that have crept unbidden into my subconscious. I’m definitely not proud of that but I think that by and large, as Americans we grew up with the assumption that as the holders of illustrious blue passports, we were born into a democratic moral superiority that gave us the obligation to police the rest of the world when it professed a misguided preference for strongmen and corrupt oligarchs. This may be obnoxious of us at times, but it’s part of the American ethos.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton swept the nation – and the world – in 2015 and even though COVID has shuttered performances, people eagerly await postponed performances, swept up by a buoyant soundtrack and the story of a founding father who has been on our money but is less familiar to us than George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. Alexander Hamilton, like his fellow compatriots, was far from a perfect man, and the musical doesn’t pretend he was, though there has been criticism from some that the slavery of the Revolutionary War era was not highlighted in Miranda’s patriotic depiction of the birth of our nation. We love Hamilton for the singable music, for the patriotism and the fervor, for the belief that we can all be Hamilton of a sort, maybe down but don’t count me out. We identify with the America Hamilton believed in, that we fought King George for, and that we built on the certainty that democracy is the eagle-soaring, majestic mountain virtuosity into which we have fashioned our identity – our tradition, our legacy, our due.

It’s been a rough year for sure. I love my family. I love our dog. I like the bright, sunny rooms of our house. I like our neighborhood and the dozen or so neighbors I know well enough to chat with about the weather, again, on one of the dog’s four daily walks. The ponderous routine of month 10 of COVID. But sometimes I just want to scream. I want to get in my car and just drive to somewhere that isn’t quarantined, that isn’t restricted in a dozen ways. Apparently I want to drive to 2019 or 2022 (we hope).

Last week, my youngest daughter found out that winter sports, which were rumored to be coming back when they go back to hybrid school later this month, are in fact still canceled or perhaps re-canceled. She’d been hoping to join basketball partly for the sport but mostly for the comradery. She was upset. “I hate covid y can’t it just go away and leave us alone so that we can do stuff we want to do instead of it getting canceled when you are excited” she texted me from her bedroom. I have no answers for this because I basically agree. Our kids have given up a lot to keep the rest of us older, comorbid people safe. It stinks. It’s not fair. We had plans. Google Maps recently sent me my list of places I went in 2020. 18 cities, it claimed. So now I know what Google Maps calls the 18 metropolitan areas within 30 miles of my house. 

In some ways we are suspended in time, Han Solo in carbonite, waiting. Cranky, tired, disappointed, canceled. Our actual physical isolation has perhaps contributed to our intense political divides. No longer going to work or to happy hour where I hear other people express views not quite aligned with, even opposed to my own creates an increased sense of detachment. I choose who I talk to. I choose who I listen to. I wonder if people have in some ways forgotten that we’re going to eventually re-enter the world more or less as it was. It’s as though this is an epoch that will be held separately from time, an anomaly that we can disown when we get back to it.

Except that our divide didn’t start with COVID. America is, in part, the land of middle class largesse, but not for everyone, and it never has been. Despite the ideals of our founding fathers, despite our soaring rhetoric, it has never been everything that we have wanted it to be. Langston Hughes was an African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1936 he published Let America Be America Again. It’s a poem about America’s great promise, even when it fails. It was never America to me, Hughes writes. But he hopes it can be. Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed, he wrote. O, let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be. He died in 1967, after Selma, but before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was an America in transition, as it is still.

I see hopeful memes about going back to the America that was, that we grew up in, that our parents grew up in. And yet that America wasn’t the dream the dreamers dreamed. It was good for a few, tolerable for many, and still tragic for some. But there was a sense of forward momentum. The problem now is that we’ve lost our compass. We still have blue passports, but we can’t use them to get anywhere, and as we watch our own citizens attack our Capitol and call for the deaths of our lawmakers, we’ve certainly lost our perceived democratic superiority. We’re unmoored and drifting. Facts have become malleable. Hate has become fashionable. Great swaths of our country have been convinced that they can’t trust anyone who expresses faith in science, that everything is a conspiracy so deep that there is no evidence for it and if told not to believe their eyes, they will willingly blind themselves.

Months before the Presidential election, our nation’s President began to claim that no matter what, the election would be invalid unless he won. Hedging his bets, he wanted to make sure that seeds of distrust were sown, and he planted a bountiful crop. Election officials worked tirelessly to ensure that the record number of votes, cast during a pandemic, were counted faithfully. They were re-counted. They were hand-counted. Lawsuits lodged to try to disqualify votes were thrown out, by both Democratic and Republican-appointed judges, time after time. No evidence was produced again and again and again. As threats grew violent against public servants and volunteers who had simply counted and recounted the votes, state officials from the President’s own party went on television to plead with the President and his cadre to stop spreading the flames, to stop throwing fuel on the fire. Instead, the drumbeat of misdirection and sleight of hand continued from the President’s camp.

Our elected leaders, many of them lawyers themselves with a complete understanding of our court system and what such an absolute lack of evidence surely meant, added their voices to invalidate what the courts, elected bipartisan officials and the multi-counted vote tallies made clear. Trump had lost. More people voted for Biden. In the democracy begun by Alexander Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, this is how the process works. Votes are cast. Votes are counted. The winner advances, the loser retreats. This is what we expect from other nations. This is what we, from our democratic ivory tower, have demanded from strongman totalitarian governments around the world.

And yet… Don’t believe what you see. Blind yourself, the President commanded, and so it was done. Now, after an attempted coup, a riot in the halls of the Capitol in which the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and brought Molotov cocktails and zip ties and killed one police officer with a fire extinguisher to the head while beating others unconscious with American flag poles … now those Republicans arsonists who burned down a democracy have the audacity to ask for unity. To ask for unity and insist that less than a clean slate is somehow irresponsible of those who won the election, while they wipe the last of the cinders from their lapels.

This is how you gaslight a nation.

Except that half the nation did not blind itself. Half the nation knows an abusive manipulator when they see one. And it turns out, the half he gaslighted was his own. It’s up to them if they want to pick themselves up, put in the work and, with a little luck, earn the resilience that comes with having been down, and picked oneself up. It’s been a rough year. We’re all tired and cranky and disappointed. But not all of us are buying the bullshit. Some of us see just fine.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed… let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be.