Watching political events unfold over the last few days, and anticipating the next couple to come, has me thinking of Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel.
Of course, I've never actually read the novel; rather, I went to see the movie when it hit the theaters around the time I was starting college. I remember it as chilling, sad, but in the end hopeful. That sounds a lot like right now.
The story begins in a place that looks like Norman Rockwell Americana, small town America as it once was. The carnival has come to town; or, as we would have called it in less sensitive times, the freak show. At the helm of the show is Mr. Dark, a charming, fiendish figure who sets up shop and begins to learn his new village. All their secret desires and regrets and pain, he absorbs and uses to craft the ultimate temptation--what if I could give you that thing for which you long in the deepest recesses of your heart? The legless veteran who was once a football star runs again. The older parent who wishes he was young enough to play with his son as a young man finds his vigor. The salesman longing to catch the eye of the pretty girl--that can be arranged, as well.
And for our two young protagonists, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, the desire is to escape childhood and become adults. One quick trip around the carousel can make that happen.
The catch? Like an Arabian genie, Mr. Dark's promises are true and false at the same time. You may get your wish, but at the cost of everything that made it seem worth having. The desire was always impossible, or came at such a cost that it wasn't worth having. All of those "freaks" in his show are others who've encountered the temptations he presents on prior carnival stops, and found themselves bound and soulless and spending eternity in his circle of lies and temptation.
Mr. Dark leapt into my conscious memory as I sat at the kitchen table a few days ago with an old, close friend, an extremely well-educated and engaging guy with whom I've served on statewide boards together in years past. He and his wife were passing through enroute from their mountain house to their home down the coast, and were our first non-family guests here in the pandemic world.
More often than not we in our circle, such as it is, don't say or do anything that would give away our politics in social settings. To me, wearing a "Trump--no more bullshit" cap to a meeting tells me everything I need to know about a person, and that's happened a couple times in the last few months. Steering clear of politics is a convention we employ to keep the radical partisanship of these most unusual times from destroying relationships that have taken a lifetime to build.
Well, that and blocking people on Facebook for thirty days when they post something vitriolic and/or demonstrably false. No one gets unfriended, because I hang onto hope.
So, back to the kitchen table. Out of nowhere it seems, my friend shifted gears in a conversation about the country's response to the pandemic. "I don't know about your politics, or how you feel about our president. I like the policies. I could do without the personality."
This is the mantra I hear from the cohort of well-educated Republicans who are looking for a way to rationalize their vote a couple months back. That, and they're all against "socialism", even as we pump several trillion dollars of borrowed federal money into an economy that is faltering largely due to the inept lack of a coherent response to the greatest public health disaster of our era.
But let's stay on that first point--"I like the policies. I could do without the personality."
From there, I'll set aside the groaning question of which policies these people "like." Banning abortion? Packing the courts with ideologues? Mocking the disabled? Institutional racism?
Usually it's that they think their tax bill will be lower under the Republicans, which is true so long as we can keep borrowing money for free to cover a pile of bills that never gets any lower, and won't have to pay it back. Hey, wait just a minute . . .
But assume the "policies" aren't as odious as all that, or at least set aside reality for a moment and look at the atavistic bargain. In exchange for "making America great again," we've surrendered what, exactly? Belief in the rule of law? Adherence to basic norms of civilized behavior, starting at the top? Living out our basic constitutional principles, which are the glue that holds us together far more than ethnicity or theology?
And that is Mr. Dark's bargain, presented at this moment by the President. I can give you the unattainable thing, the simple world that didn't actually exist sixty years ago but can be again if you suspend incredulity for a moment. Betray your principles, but only a little. The ends justify the means.
But like every demonic bargain, by the time we look at life's settlement statement and see what was paid over in exchange for the chimeral fantasy we bought with our souls, we realize that the underlying value was in what was lost and not what was gained. This is a country founded on an idea, an idea so powerfully desirable in its own right that for the second half of the twentieth century it was the goal of much of humanity. We were a place of hope and opportunity and freedom, not because we were mostly white and Protestant, but because we swore allegiance to the notion that everyone would play by the same rules and get a fair shake here. We didn't always live up to that principle, but we never cynically set it aside in the name of preserving power for one ethnic group.
And as Martin Luther King reminded us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Until now, we seemed haltingly to always be advancing toward more perfect union.
We forgot all that over the last several years, and damn near lost our souls in the process. Now Mr. Dark is trying to persuade the damned and near-damned to keep the carnival in town a little while longer, to complete the bargain.
January 20th can't come soon enough.
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