Writing into the Wreck

I, for one, never asked to live in a collapsing empire.

The feeling of what you thought to be solid ground turning to a shower of scree under your feet, the first act of an avalanche, is a nauseating one. You become aware, in their dissolution, of a disconcertingly firm set of beliefs you weren’t aware you had in the first place—in certain institutions, in certain outcomes, in certain social realities that felt unchangeable all your life. 

And then your country, for no discernible single reason but a host of creeping ones, decides to tear itself apart at excruciating length and horrifying cost, and you are in the middle of it all, just a flake of shale in a great juddering upheaval of the earth.

Believing in America! What an embarrassing thing to admit to ever having done, even if well-cultivated propaganda arched and foliated high above your head all your life, so you failed to notice the sour odor of rotting roots. Or you knew they were rotten, but thought they’d hold a little longer. For your lifetime, perhaps. But they haven’t. And here you are. Here I am, at any rate. Grown up in a world shaped by the social changes of the 1960s and ‘70s, and where equality and science and liberty seemed to be progressing, albeit at a crawl, only to find myself being violently thrust back into an antebellum nightmare.

Being furious all the time is uncomfortable. It feels like wearing a too-small jacket, hot and tight against the skin. Being afraid all the time cramps the stomach. Being both makes legs, brain and heart hurt. Altogether, watching the rights being stripped from yourself and people you love—watching a country shake itself to rag and bone without even the pretext of a violent civil war or a foreign invasion—is unpleasant and beyond unpleasant. And every time I look away, to steal a little bit of joy, or even take up the necessary ordinary things of life, it feels like a dereliction of duty. As if the need to constantly take in the full ruin being done every day, the daylight plundering of a nation, is a needful and useful occupation, rather than a way to heartbreak, madness, both.

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American science! The nation that gave the world the polio vaccine and the covid vaccine, put a man on the moon, gave us chemotherapy for cancer—they’re wrecking all that. Wrecking its future. Wrecking its present, in the “big beautiful bill” that promises so firmly to shutter so many hospitals, to wrench even the most miserly of help from the ill and the dying. I grew up proud of my country, proud that I lived in a place that attracted people from all around the world, to make it better. Now everyone I know who practices science does so with a pursed look of anxious anticipation, or is looking for a way out. 

Now no one wants to come here anymore, and we’re letting no one in, anyway. We’ve stopped giving money to do the miracles brilliant people do, and it feels like watching a million Libraries of Alexandria burn in real time. Because of the careless, stupid, greedy, lying, reckless wretch in charge of the nation’s science and health. Because of the human wrecking ball of an administration that put him there. Because of the feckless representatives that presented their approval on a silver platter. Because of the voters that wanted this, wanted this more than they want people to live, want it more than a better future. My countrymen, my countrywomen.

My life as a woman! My womb now a trap guarded by corrupt ministries and secret police. Women used as incubators after their brains die. Women condemned to die of sepsis. Women condemned to jail over miscarriages. A country twice picking its own self-murder over the leadership of a woman. And legislating women’s humanity away, in thickets of laws that grow like cursed briars in fairy tales, impossibly fast, and high, and sharp.

It’s one thing to laugh in the face of scorn. Another when that scorn has teeth, and a fully, raveningly amoral police state behind it. I find my laughter stilled. And I am not the only one feeling I have the wrong parts to have rights. To love wrong, to live wrong, to perform gender wrong—against the most narrow and ungenerous and theocratic definitions of wrong available, enforced by those who preach virtue and deliver violence—this becomes, daily, a greater peril. 

They’re banning books about living free and true, as you are, in your body. They’re going to drive us back to the back alleys and the butchers and the blackmailers, make love and freedom crimes, because they never thought it should have been easy or safe to be free in the first place. All they see is sin, in themselves and in others, and others are easier to punish. I am a woman and a sinner in a country determined to extinguish both. A country powerful enough to delude itself into thinking it can punish people into moral rectitude, and with the fanatical zeal at the top, with its Mike Johnsons and Mike Huckabees, to try. A country that wants female reproductive mills and dead queer people and is acting with all speed to achieve them.

And the original sin of racism, which never went away, our ghost of past, present and future, smearing its cold spectral fingers over all, raddling and haunting, killing and kidnapping, wasting lives behind bars, shoving people into vans, wearing a coward’s mask and hard and brutal hands. Creating new prisons by the fistful, the new bill would pour $100 billion into abducting and detaining people, and nothing into aiding anyone. The new era is dawning on a phalanx of secret police, flush with cash and malice. Closing the borders to brilliant and necessary and wonderful people for no other reason than fear and hate. Closing the upper echelons to people who merit them far more than the scions of privilege. 

And all of it presided over by a wretch of a man who takes his instructions from television, who can barely string a sentence together, in whose small hands the future of this country is being crushed. The ultimate Ugly American, the apotheosis and the downfall of the culture that spat him out. With the eager aid of a coalition of the fanatical and the cruel, the dissipated and the ignorant. The people who stand in front of caged prisoners, laughing for a photo op. The people whose net worth equal the GDP of rather large countries, and whose souls have become bottomless voids of avarice. A coalition out of nightmares, breaking down all boundaries to the consolidation of their power. 

In 1939, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote:

Time—time—time
to give back to God his ticket.

I refuse to—be. In
the madhouse of the inhumans
I refuse to—live. To swim

on the current of human spines.
I don’t need holes in my ears,
no need for seeing eyes.

I refuse to swim on the current of human spines.
To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.

I don’t suppose it’s easier to live through this—a country murdering its own potential and freeing its ugliest impulses and so on—if there’s the excuse of recent calamity. But at least Germany and Italy had lost, in order, a war, and a generation of young men to a war. All we did is decay from within for decades, bending over for the rich and trampling the poor. All we did was wage endless unjust war, but far enough away that most of us rarely thought about it. All we did was stagnate in the confidence of our superiority. All we did was let our institutions ossify into brittle bone. And watch the ivory things we thought were holding us together snap, one by one, a great marrowless breaking. 

The horror of discovering there was nothing, really, holding it all together but spit and goodwill, and the spit has dried up, and the marrow dried up a long time ago, and goodwill is outflanked by savagery… And then you turn, and see the people around you watching the destruction with a furious elation. Who were these institutions serving? Who were they saving? Were they worth saving? These are valid questions but it turns out the alternatives are worse.

It’s only been six months and they’re suppressing flu shots, they’re gutting Medicaid, killing the dollar, killing the country. And I find myself mourning it, or mourning the self that believed in it, or believed it could be better.

But throughout these nightmarish six months, flashes of courage beyond courage. The people who stand up to tear gas. The people who get arrested escorting migrants to court appointments. The people who won’t stop providing abortions, ever, or funding the means to do so, or raising those funds. The people who won’t be stopped from loving whom they love, or making their bodies match their minds. The authors who won’t stop writing the books cruel people want to ban, and the people who publish those books, and who fight for them. The lawyers who won’t be beaten down, who keep bringing suits. The people who flood the streets demanding no kings, who might be willing, in the future, to take less orthodox steps, having ventured down the path of opposition. 

The only measure of relief in the middle of collapse—the only secure rock in the avalanche—is the knowledge that other people feel this too, the shiv in the gut of watching a nation’s suicide, and who are doing their damnedest to stanch the bleeding. It’s a hard time to hope, living in a country where the worst are elevated and the best ground down. But all of us are carbon, and under sufficient pressure some of us become diamond, sparkling and ready to cut through anything.

I do not think I am a diamond. I am as afraid as I’ve ever been in my life. But still, even here, in the sliding wretched earth that used to be a great country, that still could be again if something better is built out of the wreckage—there are diamond-hard people who shine. And you and I can try, as best we can, to save what’s worth saving. And fight. Even with our feet sliding out from under us, we can fight. On hands and knees, shaking, we can fight. And some of us will. I hope I will, too.

Because this is how Tsvetaeva concluded her poem:

They took—suddenly—and took—openly—
took mountains—and took their entrails,
they took coal, and steel they took,
they took lead, and crystal.

And sugar they took, and took the clover,
they took the West, and they took the North,
they took the beehive, and took the haystack,
they took the South from us, and the East.

Vari—they took, and the Tatras—they took,
they took our fingers—took our friends—

But we stand up—
as long as there’s spit in our mouths!