Monday
Reader Matthew Currie has alerted me to a powerful Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that gets a some of the fragility many of us currently sense in the American experiment. “Underground System” was written in 1939 when Millay herself was feeling fragile, both because of the rise of fascism and the repercussions of a car accident.
Like many Americans, all my life I have assumed that this nation’s foundational principles were solid. I recognize that in some ways this speaks to my privileged existence as a middle-class white man, but it’s not only whites that have been shocked. I think of my black students’ dismay following Trump’s election: they thought they were living in Obama’s America, only to discover that a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, billionaire conman could be elected president.
As white insurrectionists desecrated the Capitol building, I thought of Marx’s lyrical description of capitalism shredding the old order: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned…” The passage itself borrows an image from Prospero’s speech in The Tempest:
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
I’m not yet prepared to concede that white supremacists are spelling the end of American democracy, symbolized by our own cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples. I do admit to Millay’s uneasiness, however. The “crust of the world” is thinner than I realized:
Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of
the world – it is thin.
Moles are at work beneath us; they have tunneled
the sub-soil
With separate chambers; which at an appointed
knock
Could be as one, could intersect and interlock. We
walk on the skin
Of life. No toil
Of rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation
of crops, no irrigation of the land,
Will coax the limp and flattened grain to stand
On that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled
roots of our nation.
Ease has demoralized us, nearly so; we know
Nothing of the rigors of winter: the house has a
roof against – the car a top against – the snow.
All will be well, we say; it is a habit, like the rising
of the sun,
For our country to prosper; who can prevail against
us? No one.
The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are
rotting, and hall upon hall
The moles have built their palace beneath us: we
have not far to fall.
Since the Capitol’s desecration, we have learned that many of the insurrectionists were well off, with many having incomes well over over $100,000. In other words, they know “nothing of the rigors of winter.” But if ease has not demoralized them, it has at least provided them with an environment where their paranoid fantasies can run wild. People who work two jobs a day to sustain themselves don’t have hours to spend on Nazi internet sites.
Because we are the world’s preeminent military power, no other nation can “prevail against us,” but at such moments our floorboards seem to be rotting. To borrow from the poem, it’s all very well to say that all will be well, acting as though it’s inevitable that our country will prosper. The January 6 insurrection, however, warns us that moles eat away at our foundations.
