“The extent of Greek gullibility is amazing. No lie is so outrageous as to want witness.”
—Pliny the Elder, circa 70 A.D.
Joan Didion was a writer whose work I admired and whose company I was occasionally fortunate to share. Joan was one of a kind, her friends and foes agreed, but I don’t hesitate to claim that she was also one of my kind. She was not much burdened with illusions or false hopes. When she died in December at 87, eulogists and obituary writers outdid themselves trying to describe her particular brand of unsettling skepticism, those dour and disabused insights she brought to bear on her hapless countrymen. “The grand diagnostician of American disorder,” Parul Sehgal calls her in The New York Times. The Times’ obituary also quotes one of Didion’s own psychiatric evaluations, which could serve as an epitaph for the troubled nation she leaves behind.
“In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.”
Another clinic diagnosed her as “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive.” And in her tribute to Didion, Sehgal quotes a review of “The White Album” that asks “Can nothing be done to cheer this woman up?”
About Didion’s books, the critical farewells go on in this vein — “Violence, dread and the sickening sense that the world was spinning out of control”; “Looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities …” (William Grimes). She wasn’t always as dark as the voice that animates her fiction and journalism. But when I think of Joan Didion, as the year 2022 is upon us, I can’t fight off a rush of pity for the long-suffering president of the United States, poor Joe Biden, faced with delivering a State of the Union message that might as well have been written by Didion at her most dire and doleful.
The State of the Union? There’s barely a Union to speak of, in a nation of hostile polarization where two-thirds of Southern Republicans say they’re packed and ready to secede. Their party, a grotesque amalgam of let-them-eat-cake plutocrats, God-and-guns “Christian” hypocrites and recycled Dixiecrat racists, is a morally leprous whites-only party with no policy or purpose but to disenfranchise this president’s voters and destroy anything he attempts to accomplish. A soul-sucking COVID pandemic that alternates between terror and tedium seems likely to outlast Biden’s term of office. A rabid anti-vaccine minority, unshakable in its self-destructive stupidity, swells the lethal capacities of the virus and may well doom us all.
Catastrophic weather is becoming commonplace, wildfires threaten to turn the West into a charred desert wasteland. And always there are America’s 400 million “private” guns, immune to sane regulation and fired much more frequently, relentless statistics tell us, since the pandemic turned bellicose Americans into active fratricides. As I write this on the last day of the year, the coroners are working overtime in Denver and the Gun Violence Archive has recorded 687 mass shootings (four or more casualties) in the United States in 2021, just short of two every day. Twenty-eight of them were in schools, America’s favorite theaters for massacres.
The USA, representing 5% of the world’s population, suffers nearly one-third of its mass shootings. Consider that carefully. It’s a statistic President Biden has to wake up and try to reckon with, every morning he’s in office. Is there anyone crazy enough to envy the President his job, with his hands on the steering wheel of a bloody Didion dystopia? (Yes, there is one, and yes, he is crazy indeed.)
Look around at Mr. Biden’s ragged Union, such as it is. The numbers are soaring for suicides, drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and emergency room visits for extreme depression and anxiety. Young people are suffering disproportionately — suicide attempts by adolescent girls have increased by 51% since 2019, a trend grandfathers like me and Joe Biden can hardly bear to contemplate. Domestic disaster and inflation aside, there’s global warming and Russia on the warpath. All on the desk where the buck stops, where the president sits.
Say a prayer for him. But for me and colleagues in the news business, perhaps the most ominous crisis — at least among those we can still hope to influence — is the rapid degradation and potential destruction of the information ecosystem. The technology-driven proliferation of news sources, including misinformation, disinformation and what we might call “custom-tailored” information, has completely changed the relationship between the news consumer and the traditional providers of the news he consumes. And changed it all for the worse, to judge from a recent Gallup poll. Only 36% of the Americans polled said they trusted the accuracy and fairness of mainstream news sources. Thirty-four percent declared “no confidence” at all.
We have to ask, “Who is it they trust?” How much of the blame for this sudden, drastic devaluation of professional journalism belongs to Donald Trump, a deranged megalomaniac who denounced every word that didn’t flatter him as “fake news”? How much does he share with shameless propagandists like Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who impersonate journalists and build their fortunes spouting alt-right nonsense they probably laugh about off-camera? How about the late Rush Limbaugh, who built a radio empire on bombast and transparent lies? Certainly they prepared an audience for gonzo fascist commandos like Alex Jones and the mind-boggling conspiracy peddlers who gave us QAnon, which is still going strong long after the oracular “Q”’s disappearance.
The gullibility of the average citizen is an unholy mystery, yet to be plumbed by those who deplore it or exhausted by those who exploit it. As Pliny said about the Greeks—-he was a Roman—-“no lie is so outrageous” that it can’t find a home among Americans. This was H.L. Mencken’s theme 100 years ago, and the celebrated film director Guillermo del Toro said it last week: “We have this appetite for being lifted out of reality even by the most impossible hucksterism. We’re willing to be lied to and accept it.” Joan Didion herself, as Michiko Kakutani points out in another eulogy, “was remarkably prescient in writing about the fracturing of truth as people increasingly filtered reality through the prism of their own prejudices.”
A searching hunger, not for the truth but for a truth that suits us, is a fundamental human weakness. Where would religion be without it? Fighting that dangerous hunger is a clear-eyed minority — including every journalist who was ever worth a damn — who understand that facts are the only foundation for ethical social contracts and democratic forms of government. In the best of times we achieve a balance between those who tell the truth and those who fear and avoid it. Today we may have to face the fact that this balance has been upset — permanently? — by the fathomless internet, by social media and all the new electronic tools for telling and spreading the multiverse of lies.
The consequent damage to the “free press,” the last line of defense against authoritarians like Trump, has been more than spiritual and political. More than a quarter of America’s newspapers have gone out of business in the past 15 years. A full half of the surviving dailies are controlled by financial firms like Alden Global Capital, the vulture hedge fund that buys, guts and “strip-mines” local papers for their assets. Alden now owns more than 200 newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun.
In markets where local news is dying, more people, predictably, voted for Trump.
It’s possible that the current rebellion against Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook leviathan is a faint sign of hope. I’m not on board with Adrienne LaFrance, in The Atlantic, when she writes “I still believe that the triple revolution of the internet, smartphones, and social media is a net good for society.” I beg to differ, or at least to debate. But I’m ready to cheer when she writes, “Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse.”
At least the media ecosystem is still an active battlefield. If I were writing Biden’s State of the Union address, I could begin with the devil’s work in Joan Didion’s native state of California. A state where the median price of a single-family home is $800,000 now claims more than 160,000 homeless citizens, nearly 30% of all homeless Americans. One-third of them are families with children and 70% are “unsheltered,” literally sleeping in the streets, compared to 5% in a cold-weather homeless center like New York City. In the big California cities this contrast grows more obscene. In Los Angeles a new home will cost you $810,000 and 66,000 are homeless. But the most outrageous numbers come from the city of San Francisco, where the median home price has swollen to $1.9 million while 10,000 sleep outdoors.
It’s beyond comprehension that only multimillionaires can own homes where tens of thousands are sleeping in the parks and doorways. These are not symptoms of a troubled economy, or weird trends during a pandemic. They’re not even an outgrowth of typical Republican heartlessness, not in a state as blue as California. This is about widespread system failure, a failure neither party addresses. It’s about dismissing a certain class of unfortunate people as untouchables, shivering and starving within sight of sprawling mansions. It’s medieval, and it’s a shattering indictment of America’s special recipe for mad-dog capitalism. Even under feudalism, the lords had to provide their serfs with roofs to shelter them from the wind and rain.
“Income inequality” is almost a mantra among liberals, but the monstrous gap this economy has created is an infrequent topic while politicians scramble for billionaires’ handouts. When we talk about two separate countries within the same borders, we could be talking about reasonable Americans versus terminally gullible Americans who cheer on Donald Trump. Or we could be talking about the world’s largest collection of billionaires — 724 at Forbes’ last count — versus 12 million children, one in six, who live below the poverty line. One hundred years ago Gus Kahn wrote the prophetic lyric “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” (for the foxtrot hit “Ain’t We Got Fun?). But Gus could never have imagined what “rich” means today, in the age of Jeff Bezos. America’s 400 wealthiest families are now worth more than two-thirds of the nation’s households combined.
Indefensible? By most measures the USA is the world’s wealthiest nation. Its stock market is setting records, corporations are posting their largest profit margins since 1950 and the big banks boast of an unprecedented $5 trillion bull market in mergers and acquisitions during 2021. Home prices nationally surged 18% in October. At the same time, more than a third of the nation’s children have inadequate health insurance, and visitors to a glamorous world-class city like San Francisco will find thousands of them sleeping in pup tents. Nearly every free market democracy in the world provides more security for its children than the United States can manage.
One of the things Joan Didion showed us is that you can love a place, as she loved California, without missing or denying any of its flaws. America as a concept was never quite as beautiful as its most credulous patriots maintained. But if we want to stop somewhere short of being hideous, this abominable wealth imbalance is the place to start. Does change begin when shameful becomes unspeakable, unbearable, too much for any decent individual to ignore? I’m not holding my breath.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022
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