Someday the Vietnam War will mean no more to people than the War of 1812 and the Wall will be something to lean against as you eat lunch and look at the girls and plan your weekend; I pray there will not be some new memorial to the dead of some new horror.
Most people treasure the sense of true national unity, which we briefly had after 9/11 until the Republicans took out a trademark on the tragedy—the sense of unity we try to relight every Memorial Day. (The Fourth of July is gone, a big dead hollow holiday, but Memorial Day retains a little of its spirit.) I feel that American solidarity sometimes when listening to jazz, especially Armstrong and Ellington and Benny Goodman, the old guys who swept Europe and whose music was a living symbol to the Resistance of all that was worth dying for in the fight against Hitler. I feel it sometimes on my way out of the theater after a terrific performance of a great musical, Gypsy or The Music Man or Oklahoma!—the American musical, a peculiar construction whose success depends on ensemble, not celebrity, and you sometimes see a student or amateur production that simply works and sweeps you away and it’s exhilarating (to an American anyway), all those shining faces, like seeing your kid’s baseball team play over its head for nine solid innings, and all of us Americans walk out of the theater feeling unaccountably joyful together. I feel it sometimes at the ballpark, sometimes reading the glory that is American poetry, feel it driving a car across Wyoming or through the Civil War battlefields of Virginia, Chancellorsville and the Wilderness and Fredericksburg and Antietam, or along the Mississippi. I wish that Republicans had a little more genuine love of this country and weren’t still hung up on the Sixties and so medieval in their worship of rank and hierarchy. They slid into Washington on an oil slick like a gang of small-time mafiosi and sold out representative democracy to their special patrons and backers and corrupted a lot of good Christian people in the process. This year, as in the past, they will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, wacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and show over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm. They denounce government as if it had only repressed them and civilization frustrated their noblest instincts, to which I say: “Wyoming. Go there. Try western North Dakota.” Go find a tanktown on the old N.P. line and wrest your living from the dry soil and be as paranoid and angry as you like. It’s a big country; the principles of Republicans may work very well on a 5000- acre ranch. But you can’t run cities that way and cities are where most people live.
Dante said that the hottest place in hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning. The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun. And the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all. Lord, have mercy.
As soon as I finish this book, I am going to walk around the block for a cup of coffee and watch the parade go by on Selby Avenue, sit at ease, passive, receptive, silent, in the midst of this irrational election, like a horse in a rainshower, like a tree, like an old bird on the branch, unperturbed. If you see me, come sit down, there is more to talk about.
Homegrown Democrat Page 15