Homeland Elegies(76)
It’s like nobody even sees it like a country anymore. I don’t know if they ever did, but they sure don’t now. My dad used to say it’s ’cause they’ve had to accept us coming into their part of the picture. We ruined it for them. Everything was fine when we were picking their cotton, but now that they might have to be picking ours? That’s enough to say: “Fuck it. This ain’t my place anymore. I’m gonna change the rules, take what I can, hide behind some gate, and fuck the rest.”
Mike didn’t see a political solution. To him the Democrats had betrayed not only blacks but also the country itself. Liberalism, as it was practiced today, was no less a route to self-enrichment than its opposite was. One needed look no further than the ever-rising postpresidency net worth of the Clintons—the blockbuster book deals, the $750,000 speaking fees—to recognize there was no longer a competing ideology in America. Everything was about getting rich. At least Republicans were honest about it. Mike saw a country where people were poorer, where they were lied to, where their lives felt meaner, where they had no idea how to change any of it. They’d taken the unprecedented step of putting a black intellectual into the highest office in the land, a man who promised change but offered little, whose admittedly genuine concern was marred by his superciliousness, who gloried in his pop-culture celebrity while bemoaning a system whose political dysfunctions prevented him from leading. Obama’s victory had turned out to be little more than symbolic, only hastening our nation’s long collapse into corporate autocracy, and his failures had raised the stakes immeasurably. Most Americans couldn’t cobble together a week’s expenses in case of an emergency. They had good reason to be scared and angry. They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something. The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic—and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump. Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors—an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires—yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.
*
As I walked home after our dinner at Red Rooster—up Lenox and then west, across 141st, the night was brisk and the street uncharacteristically quiet. I made my way past the empty basketball courts abutting the perimeter of the public housing projects. Mixing along the sidewalk were the scents of wood fires and marijuana smoke. As I approached Frederick Douglass Boulevard, I saw an orange couch in the middle of street and ahead, on opposite corners, two groups of young black men who paid me no mind as I passed. One of the groups was huddled around a box, picking at a frosted cake with their fingers.
My building was at the top of the hill off Convent Avenue. I marched up four flights of steps and, once inside, made a beeline for my notebook. For the next hour, I sat at the folding table in my kitchen, writing out an account of the evening, some twenty pages, front and back, shorter on details than it was on my disorientation. Despite my affection for Mike, despite my respect for the unusual granular purchase of his intellect, I couldn’t pretend to myself I didn’t think he was full of shit. His criticisms of Obama sounded petty. I suspected envy. I thought his prognostication about Trump’s victory was wrong. My father had “thoughts” about Trump, too, and those were silly. I concluded that my front-row seat to all that nonsense was no worse a perspective than Mike’s wide-ranging abstractions—probably better. If anything, I saw in my father’s silly infatuation with Trump a human component at work—weak, irrational—that didn’t fit tidily into the clean shapes Mike was drawing around the national spirit. Ever the artist, I trusted the mess.
I noted the fiery turn our talk took at the end of dinner, when he brought up just how much he hated paying taxes. At root, he said as he picked at a piece of sweet potato pie, a government built by whites could only be expected to do harm to black people. I knew my Baldwin; I’d read Ta-Nehisi Coates; I didn’t doubt what he was saying was probably right, but hearing it still shocked me. I glanced over my shoulder at the table behind us to see if our neighbors had heard him. Then I remembered where we were.
As he inveighed against the evils of government and being forced to pay into them, I will admit I thought I heard him reframing talking points already familiar to me from the GOP. The fierce glimmer in his eyes as he spoke made less and less sense to me as I mulled the staggering paradox at the heart of his politics: he believed the American government didn’t deserve his dollars because they would be used against him, a black man, forever the American enemy; so he voted for candidates who promised to lower his taxes, which meant he was ever more inclined to vote Republican, fully cognizant that Republicans were only more and more open about their intent to further ruin the lives of American blacks.
What was I missing?
“You’re missing the forest for the trees.”