Make Yourself At Home

I started going back to the 1970s last winter because I was convinced everything and everyone else was, too. This was not a good time, and I was very much Not Having A Good Time in it; in retrospect, the decision to cope with the dread I felt at anticipating several brutal years of national self-harm by watching a bunch of movies in which Gene Hackman scowled and wore weird hats and drank what was very clearly some absolutely dogshit coffee out of paper cups was something close to the healthiest possible scenario. The idea, if there was an idea, was both to get attuned to the frequencies and manias of that particular low and dishonest decade in the hope that there might be some lessons there, and maybe also to remind myself that national moments of humiliation, failure, and loss come and go in the same ways that personal ones do.

That is, they pass. American history tells us that the problems that make all that trouble do not ever get resolved, let alone solved; we don't really do that, here. This country loves its problems too much, or has just mistaken them for virtues so willfully and for so long that it can't imagine living without them; in the absence of a more representative politics, or maybe as a sort of satire of it, politics collapses into various ways to perform being upset. None of this is especially dignified, or remotely What You Want. All of it feels both like it is too dumb and unworkable to last, and like it is getting worse.