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Wednesday
As Donald Trump slings around his wrecking ball, targeting such worthy programs as Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid itself (which provides healthcare to 82 million Americans), we await to see whether anything can pierce the bubble around him. Greg Olear of the Substack blog Prevail asks, “Why do so many Americans still walk around in a fog, oblivious to the swirl of change around them, ignorant of the ill intent of the oligarchs, in denial about the malefic character of our once and current President?”
If Trump’s monumental bungling of a plague failed to wake people up, he wonders, will anything? Are Trump supporters “capable of admitting they’d been had?”
I wrote on this subject this past Monday, citing a passage from George Eliot’s Silas Marner about living in denial. Olear suggests another passage that applies, this one from W.H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety.
Before giving it to you, however, let me first quote from the poem that serves as its preamble. In “September 1, 1939,” written about the start of World War II, Auden writes,
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
The Trump era can certainly be called low and dishonest, with Biden’s four-year interlude ultimately unable to overcome Trumpism’s incessant lying and fearmongering. In Age of Anxiety, written eight years later and reflecting on how fascism got so far, Auden writes,
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
We would rather remain in our illusions—stay stuck in our s**t, as the saying goes—than face up to the truth of our condition. Our dread may make us miserable but it’s familiar. Jesus understood this state of mind and climbed “the cross of the moment” to awaken us. Stepping away from our ruin and embracing real change requires a courage that appears beyond many of us.
