Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills…
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
—William Shakespeare
Although I’ve yet to see sandwich-board men on the steps of the nation’s capitol declaring that the end of the world is nigh, I expect that it won’t be long before the Department of Homeland Security advises the country’s Chinese restaurants to embed the alert in the fortune cookies. President Obama appears before the congregations of the Democratic faithful as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, cherishing the wounds of the American body politic as if they were the stigmata of the murdered Christ. The daily newscasts update the approaches of weird storms, bring reports of missing forests and lost polar bears, number the dead and dying in Africa and the Middle East, gauge the level of America’s fast-disappearing wealth. Hollywood stages nostalgic remakes of the Book of Revelation; video games mount the battle of Armageddon on the bosom of the iPad. Nor does any week pass by without a word of warning from the oracles at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fox News, and the New York Times. Their peerings into the abyss of what to the Washington politicians are known as “the out years” never fail to discover a soon forthcoming catastrophe (default on the national debt, double-dip recession, global warming, nuclear proliferation, war in Iran) deserving the close attention of their fellow travelers aboard the bus to Kingdom Come.
If the fear of the future is the story line that for the last ten years has made it easy to confuse the instruments of the American media with the trumpets of doom, the cloud of evil omens is not without a silver lining. The tears on King Richard’s dusty paper, like the handwriting on King Belshazzar’s fiery wall, protect the profit margins of the banks and the insurance companies, serve the interests of the drug and weapons industries, allow the season’s political candidates to clothe themselves in the raiment of a messiah come to cleanse the electorate of its impurities, take America back to where it belongs, risk-free and tax-exempt, in the little house on the prairie. Adapted to the service of the Church or the ambition of the state, the fear of the future is the blessing that extorts the payment of the protection money. For the Taliban and the Tea Party it’s a useful means of crowd control, but for a democratic republic, crouching in the shadow of what might happen tomorrow tends to restrict the freedom of thought as well as the freedoms of movement, and leads eventually to a death by drowning in the bathtub of self-pity. (...)
Over the last fifty years, the picture of the future has changed often enough to become recognizable as a fashion statement. I’m old enough to remember a future that was merry and bright, everything coming up roses, men on the way to the moon, and the rain in Camelot falling only after sundown. President Kennedy in 1961 extended Tom Paine’s birthday message to every other country in the world, so sure of America’s holdings in and on the future that it could afford “to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, or oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” I’m also old enough to remember, a year later, New York City schoolchildren being advised to hide in broom closets and under desks in the event of the arrival, said to be imminent, of Soviet nuclear missiles on their way north from Cuba.
Under the administrations of nine American presidents in the years since, I’ve heard the future described in the language of both the sales pitch and the sermon, seen it advertised as sunny beach resort and lifeless desert, as equal-opportunity employer and private club. President Reagan’s new morning in America in the 1980s followed Alvin Toffler’s bestseller Future Shock, as well as the Hollywood production of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Toffler populated an American garden of technological Eden with kindly computers in California, as well-meaning as J. R. R. Tolkien’s industrious dwarves, spinning the golden threads of fiber optics and mining the jewels of microchips. The Right Stuff forged the American hero as titanium tubing impervious to reentry speeds and the heat of the sun, American power likened to a Promethean pillar of fire lifting its disciples out of the well of death. By way of balancing the market, the next decade produced multiple narratives of American decline, furnished abundant premonitions of doom in the form of popular books (The End of Science, The Death of Meaning, The End of Nature, The Death of Economics, and The End of History) drifting across the American sky well before the arrivals in New York of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston.
The collapse of the World Trade Center in the fall of September 2001 destroyed the last trace elements of the American future conceived as a nostalgic rerun of the way things were in the good old days when John Wayne was securing the nation’s frontiers and Franklin D. Roosevelt was watching over its soul. The loss of the utopian romance that had once supported both the ambition of the state and the strength of the economy was terrible to behold. So terrible that it has been replaced by an apparition—Gorgon-headed and dragon-winged—that reduces its beholders to paralyzed stone. Much of the effect I attribute to the Bush administration’s war on terror, which was lost on the day it was declared. Lost because, to wage the war, the Bush administration was obliged to manufacture, distribute, and magnify the reflection of its own ignorance and fear. Nobody’s cell phone to be left untapped, a jihadist in every rose garden.
In the years since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the palsied dysfunction has become more pronounced. The foreign wars haven’t been going according to plan; the domestic financial markets have suffered calamitous reversals of fortune; the sum of the national debt goes nowhere but up. The public parks bloom with the installations of surveillance cameras; the inspections at the airports maintain the national quota of patriotic dread, introduce the frequent flyer to the game of playing dead.
Among the country’s stupefied elites, the bad news induces the wish to make time stand still, to punish the presumption of a future that presents itself as a bill collector. As self-pitying as Shakespeare’s melancholy king, they sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of money. Without it the future doesn’t bear contemplating, doesn’t include their presence in it and therefore doesn’t exist. How then can the banks be expected to lend money, the government to build hospitals and schools, the rich to pay taxes for comforts not their own? The suggestion is outrageous, an intolerable effrontery, out of line with the all-American revelation that the name of the game is selfishness. The surplus of resentment affords the excuses to do nothing and bids up the market in transcendence. Politicians in Congress stand around like trees in a petrified forest, or, if allied with the zeal of the Tea Party, console themselves with notions of biblical vengeance, the wrecking of any such thing as a common good a consummation devoutly to be wished. Secure in the knowledge that only the wicked shall perish, they press forward to the Day of Judgment when the host of the damned—variously identified over the course of the centuries as false priests, proud barons, profiteering capitalists, vile communists, and godless democrats—shall fall into the hands of an angry god and gnaw their tongues in anguish.
by Lewis Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
