Some thoughts after the debate

Pulling together some ideas, while mainly feeling something like actual horror.

It’s hard to describe the feeling that I had when Biden walked on stage on Thursday night. Years ago, I watched a movie that had a jump scare so sudden and profound that it completely overtook me. I had a distinct feeling of surrendering to the moment, thinking, “Okay, I can’t intervene with this feeling in any way. I just have to feel it.” A deep, involuntary gasp emerged out of my body.

And then, of course, it was over. Because it was a movie.

Something like that begins to describe what I felt the moment President Biden walked out on stage. Something from outside all of my frames was coming in. The most apt word is horror, but it was a simultaneously larger, more diffuse, and more long-lasting feeling than horror.

I can still see in Joe Biden the person that should be president. Fundamentally, if the Democratic ticket were a Magic 8 Ball, and a dart board with a bunch of decisions written on it, I would vote for that. But also, I still see a great American leader in Biden. A person who thoughtfully understands systems and who has personal values of decency, charity and grace. A person who, through a long life of well-lived experience, has written the great archetypes of the American vision in himself. A person who is able to articulate a vision in a resounding way that sets a tone for America — as our leader should. That person is still visible.

Also, that person is unmistakably fading from view. He’s being pulled away from us, as though out of this world and into the next. Biden’s frailty is indeed horrifying to me. It’s as though I can feel how vulnerable every single moment must be for him. And the fact that we seem to need this man in that position so badly is also horrifying. His life is a symbol of the state of the country itself.

Joe Biden is running for re-election in a country that is afraid of what it can’t help but become. And nobody, it seems, is sure what that thing is that it must become. It’s just happening.

The bad news: how deep it runs

If not Biden, who else? I don’t see any candidate who is ready. And it’s just unthinkable that conservatism led by MAGA-themed ideology should be steering the ship. The deeper problem seems to be that, while America continues to make progress in some ways — for example, in its efforts toward tolerance and inclusiveness — we are failing to transmit from one generation to the next a sufficient number the habits that can be trusted to sustain a great society. We are — as though to the very last one of us — small-minded, naive, and preoccupied with leisure. We think shallowly, and we rarely even connect with the levels of instructive wisdom that are plainly available to us.

For example, the second-most disquieting thing I saw this week was this exchange between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana State Representative Lauren Ventrella about Louisiana’s new requirement that every classroom, from kindergarten through university, display the Ten Commandments.

Let’s allow Jacob Newsom’s perhaps somewhat-less-than-John-Brown-like act of defiance speak for itself, in order to focus on the interchange between Ventrella and Sanchez. Also, I’m going to charitably suppose that Representative Ventrella is the kind of person who, in the day-to-day conduct of her work, is cannier than she can appear in a few moments like this — because I am almost certain that that’s true. Even so, the ignorance on display here astonishes me.

Ventrella seems genuinely incapable of having a meaningful discussion about the controversy surrounding the new law. And it doesn’t at all seem to be the point, either. Representative Lauren Ventrella does not seem to be interested in persuading people who have reasonable concerns; she seems to be interested in winning a battle that a particular conservative ideology wages against anything that challenges it. It’s evinced perhaps most clearly when she slides, casually, into attacking Sanchez for what she imagines (I cannot suppose that she knows) his salary to be. It’s a strikingly pure example of an uncomfortably common American archetype of today — veneer and will, without depth or reason.

At the same time, Boris Sanchez’s conduct of the interview isn’t encouraging, either. Sanchez’s understanding of role the Ten Commandments in the landscape of Christian practice is vague at best, and seems to be, at best, cursorily researched. This interview could have pointed out that the first three of the Ten Commandments are about Judaic worship of a distinctly Judaic version of God, and Ventrella could have been asked whether that should be considered to be a historical reference, or a cultural reference favoring one religious view over others — in a society that fundamentally separates church and state. The interview could have harkened to things like Project Blitz and its slate of boiler-plate Christian nationalist laws that it hopes to ram through every state legislature it can. It could have teased out an underlying aim of a law like this which, I think, clearly, is a desire for moral renewal — and then it could have asked whether it isn’t better to try to articulate that moral renewal in more universally accessible terms — thus advancing, in a clear way, one of the more salient challenges in American education today.

Here, generally, is a chance to ask deeper questions about Christian nationalism, morality, social fabric, education, and more. And none of it happens, because neither of the participants are prepared to do it.

My point is that this lack of depth is usual. This lack of depth, or iterations of it, runs through the American two-party system — at least more than it should. It runs profoundly through American media, and it runs profoundly through American society. Civilization can be more deeply understood when it is examined more thoughtfully, but there is genuine question about whether we, Americans, understand civilization well enough to keep the best of it that we’ve enjoyed up to this point.

To me, Joe Biden’s presidency is clearly symbolic of this reality. What fades in Joe Biden fades in America, because we no longer know how to reproduce it.

Some good news: a form of “perennial-ness”

I didn’t say “perennialism,” because I don’t mean to confuse with the spiritual concept of perennial philosophy. That’s not what I mean. I just mean that there were a couple of reflections on the debate that were so lively with humor that they reminded me that somehow — somehow — life renews. The first of these was Matt Labash’s most recent Substack piece, and some of his commentary in a pundit’s post-mortem in The New York Times. Here’s a key quote from the latter:

The big loser tonight was my sobriety. The only way to face the awful choice before us is stone-cold plastered. Thanks for nothing, primary voters. This is your fault. The unspoken winner was Jake Tapper’s vest. Vests are elegant and slimming and deserve to make a comeback.

The second was Jon Stewart’s take on the debate, which I found particularly medicinal:

I suppose you could argue that Jon Stewart’s life circumstances give him more reason than most to be detached. But I don’t feel like that’s what’s going on here. Watching him walk through my own thoughts, and react with such a sense of life — “This cannot be real life! It just can’t! F*ck! We’re America!” — was healing. Jon Stewart often talks about his Jewishness, and I had to wonder if that pertained. It’s easy to see a certain Jewish perspective, steeped in Babylonian exile, diaspora, inquisitions, the Holocaust, sitting comfortingly beside horrified goyim today and saying, warmly, “First time, huh?”

That’s not, at all, to tile over deep-seated fears that run through Jewish communities about the rise anti-semitism and anti-semitic violence by the way. Please, let me not tread too blithely, and please see what I mean.

Wherever it comes from, I feel like Jon Stewart sees and feels something I don’t. Something about life continually asserting a life-giving order, even when things are coming apart. It’s this perennial-ness that I find myself looking for now. Not in bromides, but in an effort to learn more deeply about living by faith and not by sight. I think about cosmic notions of restoration, and concepts like the Buddhist idea of Interbeing — that all of existence a complex web seeking goodness and fulfillment. We are still in this sort of universe, I believe, this sort of world. All of the life-giving mechanisms of physical nature, human nature, transcendent nature are still operating — and on some level, simply as they should.

There are people who will talk about visible hope, and I think that’s a mistake. Because I don’t think there is visible hope. I’m reminded of a scene in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, when shortly after the explosion a control room technician goes down to see what happened and finds himself staring with his naked eyes into an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. When he reports what he saw, he’s clearly appalled to have glimpsed something no one is meant to.

That’s kind of how I feel about a lot of what’s happening right now. No one should watch a good civilization crumble. It’s too much. This cannot be real life!

And yet, it most certainly is real life. So I think there is always to recur to where the genuine streams of goodness appear to be emerging — many of which are likely to be pretty local right now, I suspect. And I think we also have to keep our eyes open to the larger realities, too — even if they’re horrifying. To let the uncontrolled gasp to emerge as we let its stimulus sink in. When we don’t know what to do, then nakedly, fully not knowing is the keenest wisdom.

I believe all of this is meant to work in us somehow. All of it instructs. All of it leads, somehow, to light.

That’s about all I got. Still feel a little gut-punched. Oh, and also this, which keeps coming to my mind, as though transmitted:

“Buckle up.”