We’re a Little Lost Here in America

“Kathy I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America.”

I try, in this column, to look for America. I’ve been writing about that search here for almost three years now. Not sure what we’ve found, but the search is challenging and rewarding, for me at least.

But like songwriter Paul Simon, I often feel empty and aching about my native land. Probably lost, too, not sure why. Of equal concern to me is that my nation feels lost. Where are we going, and do we know how to get there?

In these columns I use lots of travel images and metaphors; I have written about road trips and great rivers, about marchers and mountain climbers. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself that “we the people,” a pilgrim people (meaning we will always be on the road) actually have a plan, a map. Like the Constitution, that’s a good guidebook for a people on a journey. Our destination shouldn’t really be that hard to find: I suggest we plan to stop at “ liberty and justice for all.”

But lately we feel more like a traffic jam, or a car crash pileup with fist fights over who’s to blame. Reading all the end of the year reflections and summations, and predictions for the new year, gets me thinking this way. How many roads must we walk down, before we are called a nation? The answer may only be, that it’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Charlie PierceSo as I ease back after a couple weeks off, allow me to reprint selections from the fine and wise end of the year column by a writer and social critic I admire, Charlie Pierce. He writes a regular political blog for Esquire Magazine, is a sports and culture contributor to Grantland , and is a regular panelist on the very funny National Public Radio news quiz show, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” 

This is from his political blog, somewhat edited.

He begins by reminding us of how much has changed in the past 10 years. Think about what it was like in 2005:

A decade ago, we were all preparing to endure the second round of the Avignon Presidency*, which we, as a nation, unaccountably had re-installed in Washington -- or that we, as a nation, at the very least, had voted for in sufficient numbers to keep the result of the election within the Margin Of Finagle in places like Ohio. Hurricane Katrina was still in our future…. Very large investment banks were writing mortgages with their eyes closed, monetizing those mortgages into securities, selling those securities to various suckers, and betting on the failure of those securities among themselves. A lot of people were getting very rich planting land mines throughout the world economy. All of that was going on as we prepared, in our infinite wisdom, a mere decade ago, to inaugurate George W. Bush for a second term as the most powerful man in the world.

(*Avignon Presidency: That’s Pierce’s slang for the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency. He says, “The "Avignon" refers to a period of the Middle Ages in which the people were seized by a sense of dread and fatalism when confronted with the incompetency and flagrant wastefulness and corruption of the ruling party in the Catholic Church.”)

Now I will skip to the end of Pierce’s column. I’ve reformatted it into separate sentences. It almost sounds to me like a confession or prayer:

We are a little lost here in America.

Too many of us have tuned out, and too many of us are deeply tuned in to the wrong things.

Our eccentricities have curdled into crochets.

Our love for the strange and deeply weird has soured into a devotion to the mean and deeply angry.

Our renegade national soul has given itself up to petty outlawry.

We have tailored the principles of our founding documents -- flawed though their authors were -- into cheap camouflage for our boring traditional grudges.

(That’s Pierce’s lament. He ends with a little hope, but he’s basically a pretty cynical/realistic guy, so it’s just a hint of hope):

None of these things are good things. But none of those things is permanent, either. Imagination always has been the way out -- a faith in that which seems impossible, a trust that not every mystery is a murder mystery, and that not every mysterious creature is a monster. Imagination is the way out -- a belief that safety is not necessarily the primary (or even the secondary) goal of democratic citizenship, and that a self-governing political commonwealth does not always come with a lifetime guarantee. Yes, we are a little lost here in America, but we can find our way, and the best way that we can find is the one that seems like the least secure, the darkest trail, the one with the long, sweeping bend in the road that leads god knows where. We must trust what we can imagine, and we must trust that what we can imagine is the product of what is the best of us. And, whether we imagine it or not, it's going to happen anyway.

Or, as that great sage Joaquin Andujar once put it, "My favorite word in English is, 'Youneverknow.'"

Happy Fcking New Year, to all of us magnificent bastids.

To which I’ll add in my New Year’s greetings: May we keep imagining, and may we find our way.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter