Our revels now are ended. 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-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest 4.1.146-158)
Starting in the summer of 2015, when it first occurred to me that Donald Trump could become President, I wrote about him every single month, examining every shred of evidence. This time I haven't done so, and I can hardly say why: fatigue, fatalism, indignation that it is all happening again, despite anything any of us say.
I started out to write a summary, a sort of "Night Thoughts" piece, to go over the entire position, but haven't the energy just now. It is almost two months into a new year, and I haven't written anything for the Spectacle. So here is a dispatch-from-the-front observation and epiphany instead.
Do a Google search immediately on "that fell apart really quickly",then come back here. The most unusual use I found (in the top five results) was on a page called "Data Science for the Theme Park world" (no shit). Other sites using the quote were about comics (or comix), sushi, journaling and prints. I remember a use in The Big Bang Theory, when Penny and Will are fired from a B-movie set within minutes of starting a scene.
I just never thought I would use the phrase to describe the nation in which I have lived seventy years, the United States.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, the year of my birth. I spent my first year or so of kindergarten and grade school in all-white classes, before African-American students began to be bussed in. They were unhappy to be there and the white kids never welcomed them. Twenty years later, as a young lawyer, I encountered more black judges than lawyers. In the interim, I had lived in all white nighborhoods in Brooklyn. I attended the first showing of a new Spike Lee film sometime in the 1990's, and was startled as the auditorium filled with black professionals I otherwise never met in daily life, and who were dressed much better than I was. In 2002, starting work as an EMT, I discovered how much of Brooklyn was black; as a child, my family had driven me from white enclave to enclave, so I never knew. Later, there were more black lawyers in sight, and in the pro bono free speech practice I have developed in the current emergency, I represent a majority of clients of color. The Black student caucus at a prominent private university tell me that, after the Supreme Court cancelled affirmative action, the number of Black students in the next entering class was less than half the year before. I had heard a few years ago that the number of Black students at Stuyvesant High School was a fraction of what it had been in the 1990's-- a phenomenon which seemed to implicate other societal factors, some New York-specific, and not just the Supreme Court and Donald Trump.
In the last few weeks, universities and companies are racing to delete references to "diversity" from their websites. Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, fired the senior African American and the two senior women in the armed forces (at least one of whom he had already accused of being a "diversity" hire). Supposed liberal bastion MSNBC just fired every nonwhite anchor from the prime time line up.
I could come up with examples on every front-- one way to do it would be to work through every significant clause in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and illustrate how little it means to us today. The take-away? Our commitment to Brown was only ever skin deep. And when someone in power screams and bullies loudly enough, people one thought would have an ounce of courage become complicit through action, or sycophancy, or silence. In a heartbeat. I always knew our nation lacked a strong foundation, but I never expected that the structures laid in 250 years ago would fragment overnight.
Ten or twelve years ago, in an introduction James Russell Lowell wrote for an 1890 edition of Aeropagitica, I found some words which have tolled like a bell ever since: “[E]ven democracies are a great while in finding out that everything may be left to the instincts of a free people except those instincts themselves”. I have written a great deal about the "Stupid Voter Project" in which both parties have engaged-- but the modern day Republicans excelled-- of creating a voter who can be easily conned, baffled or bullied; who can believe just a few years later that no violence occurred on January 6, 2020, despite the video. To have a robust America, we would have needed a robust American.
This, the title of this piece, and the Shakespeare quote may create the impression that I have given up. I haven't. First, I learned to live years ago as if I were an optimist. I also like to remember that the Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years (at a terrible cost, but still). Though this is worse, I also remember that the pendulum swung back after the Alien and Sedition Act years, Wilson's prosecutions and the Palmer Raids in the 1910's and '20's, the McCarthy era and Richard Nixon. Reverend King's statement (actually a trope he quoted, not words he created) that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice, has something to it: if you don't have complete confidence that it is an objective prediction of a returning pendulum in your own lifetime, it at least is an icon or memento supporting the subjective approach, professional optimism.