Absurdistan*

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

– W.B. Yeats

Could there be an epigraph more apt for this precise moment we are living?

A deadly pandemic is cutting a swath of death across the country and the president is allowing or even fomenting the catastrophe. By forcing meatpacking workers to labor or die of hunger. By ignoring the outstanding set of experts who represent the best scientific community in the world and instead putting in charge his favorite toadies, hacks, yes-men and yes-women to fight a plague. He peddles false cures, talks about injecting disinfectant into the body as a treatment.

Amid the calamity, another innocent black man is murdered by four policemen in Minneapolis, following a familiar pattern of blue on black homicide. Nine out of ten times such crimes are met with impunity. That is no exaggeration or approximation. According to a former federal prosecutor appearing on MSNBC, in recent years, one hundred police officers have been charged with the murder of African Americans. Ten have been convicted.

Massive protests erupt all over the nation. The protesters are black, brown, Asian, white, and Native Americans. After the black attorney general of Minnesota is asked by the governor to take over the case, four cops are indicted for murder.

Troops on the streets of the capital. Cops dispersing a peaceful crowd in a public park in the heart of Washington wielding batons and firing tear gas. The brutality committed so that President Donald J. Trump, the Emperor, T-Rex, Jurassic Park’s apex predator, could stroll across the park to stand in front of a church he has never attended, against the opposition of the clergy, to hold a Bible he has never read.

SWAT cops in Buffalo, New York, brutally knocking down a peaceful protester, a 75-year old man, his head hitting the ground hard, the officers passing by unconcerned with the life of the bleeding, possibly dying man on his back. The victim is still in the hospital in serious condition.

The president and the attorney general, it became clear, are organizing and justifying the repression, with hardly a word for its victims or the abuse of authority.

Many retired top military officers have publicly protested the use of the nation’s armed forces against fellow Americans. The president, who moved heaven and earth when it was his turn to wear the uniform to avoid service, derides and belittles generals, admirals, ambassadors, and intelligence officers.

Is this the United States of America?

No. This is Absurdistan.

And we wonder, what is next, as Yeats did:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

What Picasso said about painting is true about poetry. You draw the outlines of what might be a horse, but you do not label the painting “Horse.” So, we are not to know exactly what Yeats meant by “a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.” But we can speculate. Yeats died in 1939. Hitler came to power in 1933.

These times are not only terrible, they are also ominous. The worst might be still to come. The rough beasts are still rampaging. For now, is grief—for all the George Floyds of the world, known or ignored, for all their loved ones; for the dead from COVID-19, especially those who would have lived if our government were at least a decent one, never mind a competent one; for what remained of American democracy after the plutocrats, the racists, the reactionaries, the Republicans, and Trump had had their way with Lady Liberty in the worst way and without her consent.

For forty years, Republicans have been successfully carrying out a counterrevolution against history: contra the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the war against poverty, progressive taxation, the gay movement, the new immigration, abortion, science, and democracy itself. Now, in the wake of the pandemic and the glaring inequalities and institutional dysfunctions COVID-19 has made crystal clear—medicine for profit rather than health, scant protection for unemployed workers and for those compelled to work at hazardous jobs—there is finally a chance that the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, might change dramatically. The national rebellion against racial injustice easily could morph into a rebellion against economic and social injustice. The Republicans, the reactionaries, the racists, the selfish plutocrats, will resist, mostly by foul means.

Who wins the fight, the forces for fairness or the protectors of privilege, will determine whether the United States has a future as a fair and democratic society or as a plutocracy, a country of the few, for the few, and by the few.

So, my closing question: Is this country irredeemable? Or will the tide of righteous indignation on behalf of justice we are now seeing be sustainable and effective and sweep all the malign reactionaries who govern us out to sea (politically and ideologically)—Trump, McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and all the other scoundrels.

[*Absurdistan is a novel by Gary Shteygart. My title is an homage/ For more about the novel, see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0040JHZ8M/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1]