The Battle Hymn

On one side of the splitscreen plays, some people say, one of the greatest stories ever told. A band of pilgrims wanders the desert wilderness of the American West, maybe the Mojave. The brilliant light of the afternoon sun–punishing, ecstatic, purifying– floods the ready metaphorics of the landscape.

It’s been quite a month for those fighting the holy culture wars. Like an old Flintstones episode, their battle scenes take place before animated backdrops, where the scenery appears on endless loop.

His presentation was anchored by satellite and surveillance images, dark and blurry and indefinite, meant to illustrate a vast capacity for weapons production. Each image contained arrows and circles and thought bubbles, designating what each image was supposed to mean.

The message arrives in an old-fashioned way, through the horse-and-buggy mail, in an envelope swollen with extravagance and calligraphy.

An already difficult and already complicated opportunity for laughter becomes that much more difficult and complicated and, ultimately, difficult and complicated jokes are not usually very funny, precisely because they are so difficult and complicated.

Although riddled with omissions, Pyle wrote and became popular with the presumption that the truth, well told, however personal, degrading, and personally horrific, was a communicative act that could unify. Curiously, once upon a time, truth did work this way, in the stylistics of American propaganda.

And now, in her real life, in her public life, as a weaponized and faith based political operative, she says, through sobs--having recited her struggle yet again without a trace of insight, the doctor notes--she swoons and sometimes even passes out whenever anyone uses the words: “public restroom.”

From syntax to zeitgeist, it turns out that verbal passivity leads, indirectly, through wordy and circuitous paths, from grammar to the public sphere and there, in the town square, for everyone to see, fingers are pointed elsewhere.

Sychopancy and substance aside, a different kind of civil war has indeed been joined, however, by right-way-thinking strategists and wanna-be alphas. The sour, in-house, backstage squabble is not about policy. It is about finding a style that is irresistible to the increasingly paranoid base and will keep them watching.

Our first glimpses seemed carnivalesque, disorganized, spontaneous, a MAGA circus of sorts. A painted clown with satyr horns, howling not at the moon but at the ornate ceiling of the United States Capitol. The mute extras from Trump rallies, guileless, taking selfies with statues and each other, the dead and the living, leaving their digital footprints and corporal fingerprints everywhere

But where is the evidence--not the belief, but the evidence--that anyone on the white, political right who has agreed to the contract is now being excluded from participating in it? Getting in a huff about Starbucks holiday decor doesn’t count.

Such was the magic number Trump hoped to shake out of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, on January 2, 2021, during a now infamous, hour-long plus phone call. Although the conversation wandered very far and very, very wide, the President always came back to either that particular, peculiar figure or one quite like it.

Our blip of a moment in history may instead be more frequently recalled for a worldwide pandemic, for the resulting number of dead, for the speed in which a vaccine was developed, and as a perfect, pithy example of the ever resurgent power of propaganda.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

At the height of his authority, in addition to presiding over county jails and the official deputies of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Joe commands 36 different all-volunteer posse groups.

Telling without telling, the cashout stays in the just beyond, in the future conditional. We never find out exactly what Lady Gaga did. That’s okay, actually. It’s better that way, even.

To wrestle with this, and as a nation wrestle we must, an unfamiliar, yet not unknown, American wilderness awaits our brave journey, where our national ambivalence remains unsettled and volatile. It is difficult to imagine a reckoning in this American landscape, so scarred by division, fundamental difference, and worldview.

Come the day after, little of what exhausted and demoralized you has changed. Trump is going, going, we think, gone: but with 71 million, almost half of the country’s votes stuffed in his pockets. The racism, nativism, misogyny, and the authoritarian style he represented live on. These folks probably don’t even need to go underground.

"Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper." James Baldwin

Thanks to the horrific associations they conjure, any floodlit, outdoor, nighttime political rally can bring on a reflexive chill. To frighten? And by frightening, impress? Was that the message behind Amy Coney Barrett’s nighttime gathering of Republican conspirators in a strange, after hours Supreme Court swearing in ceremony? Why the inverse mimicry of an earlier, afternoon super spreader event?

"Manifest Destiny": Journalist and newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the phrase in 1845. It captures a conviction that glosses a century of colonial expansion. A verbal anchor for the heartfelt, pervasive belief that the government and citizens of the United States have been divinely ordained to stampede across the North American continent--no matter the cost to principles or to life--and to claim it as their own.

So the battle must be joined. McEnany has done her part by helping to transform the previously secular tradition of the White House Press Briefing into a sacred act of Christian Nationalism. She has also provided a glimpse of the forces she believes she is personally up against.

In the coming days, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its full-Covid press to approve the originalist-textualist Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States. Her lovely autumn nomination ceremony in the White House Rose Garden was a family affair, full of kind, well worded tributes and good GOP vibes. The ceremony has, in the shortest of hindsights, turned out to be a superspreader event, one that has exposed a great many attendees and their families to the coronavirus. It is a textbook case for the contact tracers, whose earnest calls to the White House have gone unanswered.

Someday soon, somebody will write the definitive history of Donald Trump’s perverse anti-science. How, during a global pandemic, he has undermined the very people with the knowledge that we the people, as a nation, depend upon to survive. How scientific guidelines appear and disappear and reappear again, revised and revised and revised again, with confused and contradictory messaging on how we might protect ourselves and others from viral transmission; how firm directives written one day are then released the next as softer, optional suggestions.

So up went those monuments to Confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers and the people rallied around their new stone martyrs and wept. The purpose of the hallowed statuary, of course, was never only about commemorating history. The purpose was specific, strategic and contemporary. The goal was to inspire a gut-level, rah-rah blessing for the new crimes of Jim Crow, for the whites-only and exclusionary voting laws that needed to be defended, yet again, against Yankee judgement and possible aggression. That wordless man on the plinth in the square, holding a rifle, standing there through day and night, through summer and winter? He died so that you may live free.

Derby Day, September 5, 2020. Six white men are in attendance: the very important SENATOR FROM KENTUCKY, the not as important SENATOR FROM SOUTH CAROLINA and the as-yet-disgraced EVANGELIC IMPRESARIO, all Dixie born, and THREE YOUNG MEN, in sailor suits, who attend to them. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, all seats of Churchill Downs remain vacant, save those occupied by these six men.

Unreliable narrators pose a problem for the stories they tell. They make the world they depict for us, and we see that world through their eyes. In fiction, unreliable narrators betray themselves in a variety of ways or, to be more precise about it, they are betrayed by the writers who invented them. Unreliable narrators can be deceptive, but readers nevertheless slowly begin to doubt the narrator when contrary facts are revealed.

The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad monotonous song. “Summer is over and gone,” they sang. “Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.” The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year--the days when summer is changing into fall--the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

It’s not something you’re likely to read front to back. You flip through it, skip around in it. Glance at the afterword first and then maybe the introduction. The middle is full of off-putting grammatical nomenclature. The pronominal possessive. The appositive. The split infinitive. To soften the blow, some peculiar characters usher forth from the wings to illustrate these grammatical lessons.

After more than a year of darkness and silence, the lights of the White House Press Briefing Room, without much warning, turned back on. The flat fluorescent light reveals the shadowless theater once again. Once again, video cameras have started to record the dialogue, as the discursive engines rumble back to life. In some ways, everything is the same as it ever was.