America the Dead

Well, you know, this is something you really hate to see.

Photo by Eugene S. Robinson

Everything breaks. Apart. On a long enough time line whatever was once together is often made un-together and these are the perils of flying through space, post-facto to an explosion caused by g-d knows what. Which is to say: we’re starting off doomed.

This, despite the best of all intentions.

But there are two schools of thought here. The Chicken Little one where apart is both where we are and where we’re going. And the Alfred E. Neuman one where apart is absolutely nothing at all to worry about. Between the two is the likeliest space for the actual and the actual in this instance is dark as fuck.

“Someone might tell someone that they love them.” The speaker was Ray Paloutzian. It was a class on psychology and religion and Paloutzian’s work on the psychology of religion is well worth a read. He was wry, as fuck, so I smiled, anticipating where this was going. I mean telling someone you love them is very different from loving them.

“And they could still kill the person they loved.” I smiled still. It was dark but I’m dark.

You know when I sang for Whipping Boy I once sang “America Must Die…” I never thought far enough ahead to know what it would feel like to live inside a corpse.

“Like when my sister’s husband came in through our backdoor and killed my sister on our kitchen floor before we could do anything.” My smile, stuck now, was a plastered rictus of horror. “He loved her.”

Both things were terribly far apart and both things were widely and wildly true. Oxbow’s next record Love’s Holiday will lyrically be partially influenced by this moment. My next novel, Love? Love!, similarly. It’s an obsession and I am obsessed about the space between what words mean and what we believe them to mean. But none of us have to go that far for this meditation since it’s very specifically, if we live in America, a state that we live in. All the time. Every day.

And courtesy of an Internet-fueled zeitgeist that answers even the mildest of queries with the reflexive and defensive vitriol of a person on the witness stand, I can feel those Alfred E. Neuman’s spoiling for a fight in their eagerness to tell me I am wrong. Proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am much more than right: the bilious America is choking on its own bile. So it is and so it will be.

While my memory only goes as far back as the ‘60s and the Aquarian dream that some day/one day we’d all be enlightened and elevated, history moves tectonically. And age is no indication of wisdom and we’re nowhere near being wise enough to get any closer to that claim.

So working class Bostonians who had class warfare thrust upon them stabbing working class Black cats in suits for mid-70s photo ops. Asian guys born in Michigan are killed in Michigan on a night out because: Japanese cars. And January 6, 2021 “patriots” stormed the Capitol in a riot presently being minimized as no more violent than a tour group and certainly as violent as a group formed to advocate for tax-paying Black citizens who are murdered by public officials paid to protect them. Did I mention the numbing shooting of the innocent, week after week after week?

Look, this is not Nixon’s fault. Well, it’s partially Nixon’s fault. He fed us paranoia and cynicism. But it was like feeding us heroin. The rest is on us.

I used to not want to give up on my love for America. Stolen from Native Americans and built by slave and other forms of cheap immigrant labor, it always felt like owning the worst bar in town. It could have been great. It wasn’t, but there was always the upside potential, and that’s why we kept at it.

However, even as late as the Civil War there was a belief afoot that America would throw itself apart. The French were betting on it back in the mid-1800s. Planning on it. But still the “Union” held. And if we made it through that, we could make it through anything, right?

Vietnam. Gulf Wars 1 and 2. Endless riots. Heroin/cocaine/crack/opioids. Serial killers. Secret bombings. Wars of adventure. Terrorism. Corruption. Vile low acts in high places. All of it.

But in 2021, it very much feels like it’s time to tap out. It reminds me of spying someone on the Lower East Side, someone incidentally from New Jersey, driving around with their headlights off. We scream over in an effort to be helpful, “your lights are off!!!”

“FUCK YOU” came the shouted response.

So I expect we’re gone and we’re never going to come back. I don’t know that this will make you feel any better but I feel better by placing the blame. Though he’s aged into this sort of randy, though avuncular “business” man, I must peg the man giving us the business. As he has since he began his entire public life as a man in this business: Rupert Murdoch.

Photo by Lola V. Robinson

“He had a well-earned reputation as an Aussie yellow-journalism monger,” said Ed Newton. Award-winning journalist, former Murdoch employee, and total disclosure, my stepfather. He worked for the New York Post back in the ‘70s when the kindly old dowager Dorothy Schiff owned it. She, granddaughter of a wealthy financier, Schiff’s interest in social services, framed some of Newton’s award-winning work. The business of news for her was a business of social worth. As in, value.

Murdoch knew that business though, was always first and foremost about business. He bought the money-losing Post and was going to drive it to pay. In ways that he had wherever he had dared to. By feeding us a steady diet of stupid shit. Because we wanted stupid shit. First as an appetizer and then a main course and ultimately, force fed. His presence precipitated a mass exodus.

“I took a buy-out, as did all of the malcontents,” said Newton from his home in Washington, D.C. now. Still writing. Still active. Still in the fight. “If you’re sane, you don’t walk off a job on pure principle, with no endgame strategy. I don’t know how many left, but it was dozens.” People that even had they stayed in place could have done nothing to stem our desire for the low fruit being peddled where suddenly the smartest kid in class was selling smack to the slowest while laughing all the way to the bank.

I thought enough malcontents speaking truth to power could stem the flow of stupid. In micro and macro. I said as much. But no one ever went broke underestimating how broken the broken are — yes: on the left and the right. And certainly not Murdoch who parlayed this all into TV, films and a worldview that has our inevitable auto de fé as the inescapable end game.

You know when I sang for Whipping Boy I once sang “America Must Die…” I never thought far enough ahead to know what it would feel like to live inside a corpse.

I say this all to explain, and to a certain degree, beg for a dispensation because, finally, I’m leaving America. Escaping. Fleeing. Giving up. Tapping out. Not right now, mind you. But I’m not going to die here and I have to get out before I die here. I love her too much to stay. It’s one thing to kill someone you love because you love them. It’s something else entirely to love them and watch them die.

Can I make it to 2026? Will I have to? Will I get to?

Knowable but unknown. But one thing I do know: never play with what you can’t stand to lose. So I don’t. And I won’t. Keep your bromides. I’ll take my entropy in a straight glass in a place where I can nap right up against our ramshackle last act having taken the advice of bartenders a’plenty: you don’t have to go home. But you can’t stay here.

Damn right.