The Whisper in the Ear
This week: talking about Last First Snow
A time-sensitive note first: This month’s Craft Countdown takes flight Tuesday 2pm Eastern time with the book club discussion on Last First Snow and continues on Thursday at 2pm Eastern with an AMA discussion on r/Craftsequence. I have felt a certain kind of way to have the book club for this book fall at this time—a book about Los Angeles and protests and cops and what happens when war psychology and civil administration overlap and all sorts of other things too. I hope you can join us. Much to discuss.
Here I am on the west coast of the United States. There are hummingbirds outside the office window.
I was extremely angry Saturday afternoon and I’ve been angry since—at the prospect of going through all this one more damn time, at the colossal waste of the last twenty-five years (at least), at the bloodyminded profligate squandering of life, money, and humanity that characterized these wars. Their reasons were for the most part absurd back then, their prosecution corrupt, their outcomes farcical from a grand strategic perspective and tragic from the only perspective that really matters: that of human flourishing.
Is this anger productive? Accurate? I don’t know. Perhaps it would be wiser not to write about it. I’m no expert in any of the subject matter disciplines here. But neither, it seems, are the people dropping the bombs.
It may be impossible to imagine this if you are younger than I am, but the United States of America came into this century wealthy, happy, and strong—with profound problems, yes, but it seemed that our resources were ample to the challenge. We could have rebuilt the industrial base and labor movement the Reagan years eroded, we could have made ourselves a nation where decent work led to a decent life, we could have lifted people out of poverty, we could have understood and responded to climate change, we could have done deep and enduring work to address our abiding iniquities and build a society of justice, we could have redressed the wrongs of the nation’s history and made more progress on the great unfinished work of the More Perfect Union. We could have built an era of prosperity and progress and vision. And as I write that sentence I must admit that we tried to do those things, we did some of them, some of us did: folks working with scraps and determination and ingenuity and belief against great resistance—while people with wealth and money and power kept on dropping bombs.
Now: I was a kid back then. I remember listening to the radio when the Bush government first formed and named the “Department of Homeland Security,” and thinking, oh Christ, buckle up. But even when I saw clearly I saw as a child—it’s possible, even likely, that to an adult eye our resources would have seemed thin even then, our wounds deeper, and that all the struggle since has been the true work—that it couldn’t have been any easier. But even a short experience of homeownership has stressed the difference between the effort required to, say, stop a minor leak now, and replace a wall in five years. That offers some consolation: it may be tragic to think back on how much easier our problems would have been to fix twenty-five years ago—well, today is twenty five years before twenty five years from now. Someone might read this in 2050, and think, how much was possible then.
One of the great strange curses and blessings of the United States of America is that voice whispering in your ear: we could be better than this. Even now.
I haven’t been following the New York mayoral race closely, but I love Zohran Mamdani walking the length of Manhattan. It reminds me of the portrait that introduces Fiorello La Guardia in The Power Broker—I’d drop a quote here but I’m away from my library and thus operating at one tenth of my true power—an image of a man running around the city, helping fight fires, meeting schoolchildren, inaugurating buildings, opening parks, being in the place he governed. Al Smith used to take long walks in Central Park. One drawback of governance-by-wealth is that wealth insulates: it eases the challenges of life that real politics should bother itself to address, and removes those around whom it is focused from the community of humans who need problems solved. The kings of ancient days could smell the shit on the streets (though they used sachets of sweet herbs to mask it). Politics, when it loses touch with the world, becomes a psychological shadow-play absurdity of resentment and grudge. (I’m trying to remember who it was that said—the actions and hangups of truly wealthy people make a lot more sense when you realize that the folks they spend the most time around are not their friends or family or coworkers, but their private security detail.)
Anyway: good luck to New York.
And that’s what I have for now. Happy reading all, and good luck. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.