“A screaming comes across the sky” is the first sentence of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the greatest American novel about how the combination of modern science, 20th century fanaticism and the nation-state can wreak terrible damage on human beings.
The “screaming” might refer to the V2 rocket, the screaming of its victims, air raid sirens, and the overall effects of such an air attack on London. It describes a moment of supreme tension just before impact.
Every day has that feeling now – the day of supreme tension before impact – but that has been going on for 8 months now or 10 years depending on how one measures these things. The days are all collapsing on each other in the multiple daily fallout of terrible news and not-to-be-believed actions on the part of Trump and his stooges. Every iPad and phone usher a decent person into the realms of one infinite scream.
So much destruction has been willfully done to the institutions and people of this country that it will take decades to dig out and decontaminate and thus even to begin to understand the scale of losses being inflicted, the worst perhaps being the very idea of a common purpose and common good.
If you want to read 2 books about mass psychosis that sure seem similar to what we have been witnessing, pick up Diary of a Man In Despair by Friedrich Reck, a memoir/diary by an anti-Nazi German covering the years from May of 1936 to October of 1944. Soon after he was arrested and imprisoned at Dachau where he died and Days of Rage by Bryan Burroughs, a history of the violent radical left from the late’60’s into the 70’s. Both books describe in detail the totalitarian mindsets of both officials and ordinary people who have given up their independence of thought and moral judgement. Instead, they adopted an unthinking allegiance to nihilist ideologies, to hero worship and to dehumanizing their opponents. Both believed they were entitled to use violence including murder, to achieve their goals.
I have no predictions to offer – too many forces have been set in motion over these last 8 months (and by the weight of American history before that) to see anything long term with clarity. Include among those forces an omnivorous capitalism, an encompassing stupidity — the desire to give up thinking especially, racial animus and paranoia, environmental devastation — all of those and more. As far as hope is concerned, my hope is based on physics and faith. Entropy destroys any system of ideas over time. Trumpism will end.
I also have faith that there are tens of millions of good, wise human beings in this country, in every State, who will not go quietly away into their private lives but will work to save what can be saved.
I think that despair is the end of every good impulse to look out for others, sometimes those we do not know especially. We cannot afford to adopt those qualities of hatred and cynicism that Trumpism encourages.
We keep our humanity; we keep our independence of thought and judgment; we keep our imaginative capacity to inhabit other lives … or we lose it all.
