It looks like something out of a Hollywood movie.
A farce with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Or maybe a gentle, mocking Christopher Guest ensemble picture. Or a proper, politically edgy 1970s horror flick; Warren Beatty as the last sane man discovering that society has become a cannibalistic cult.
But this is real American life, of course. In our time—The Age of Trump.
At Mar-a-Lago this week, supporters of Donald Trump—led by an evangelical pastor, surrounded by Americans who call themselves devout Christians—unveiled and blessed a golden statue of the president.
To the American Founders, who feared monarchy as a kind of spiritual disease, the scene would have been unthinkable. To Abraham Lincoln, who in his unsparing Second Inaugural Address warned against any nation that mistook itself for God’s instrument, it would have been monstrous. For all real patriots, it is radically un-American and absurd, a black comedy that tells such a damning tale it should have led the news for a week.
Instead it surfaced briefly in our feeds and sank back into the murky waters of our troubled and dishonorable days.
What do you see in that image? I look at it and yes, I see its horror, its absurdity. But more than anything I see people who are lost, and I pity them. Truly.
We were not supposed to be this way. Something has broken deep in the American character, the nation’s civic soul. We are not the country of just a few years ago. Something shifted, shattered, collapsed.
Now, I do not for a moment believe that most people who voted for Trump are as lost as the Mar-a-Lago communicants. I understand that good people had good reasons to vote for Trump. Some are my friends. Nevertheless, I believe that support for Trump—for whatever reason—is harming our country, and fuels the threat to our nation and to the civic culture that has sustained it for centuries. Support for Trump is the ground out of which grow the fields of worshippers across America who all bow down before the same golden false god.
How did we get here, on this terribly dangerous path? Many Americans, it seems to me, have lost touch with the habits of mind and disciplines of social life that once made us a distinctively practical people—plain, sturdy, prone to occasional enthusiasms and grievous mistakes, but not to gilded idols. Not that, for God’s sake.
That is because beneath our pragmatism and our (sometimes vicious) ambition to conquer a continent and get rich quick, there lay a quieter assumption: That we were aligned with the plan of a benevolent God, however defined and understood across our pluralistic land. We believed, without examining or questioning that belief that America, worked hard enough, would be both great and good.
You feel that current running from Benjamin Franklin’s deist serenity through Lincoln’s fearsome piety to Barack Obama’s reading of American history as the righteous struggle of civil rights and human dignity.
But we are lost. Something has gone out of us.
We have lost faith. That is what we are seeing at Mar-a-Lago. But faith doesn’t vanish. It lands on other things. There is a hardwired human need to enchant our purposes, and it does not disappear when the older sources fail. It lands elsewhere, takes another form—and that, too, is what we are seeing at Mar-a-Lago.
The late, great American writer David Foster Wallace understood all this. In his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, Wallace gave us the warning we are now living inside:
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you… Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
David Foster Wallace died in 2008. He saw it coming. The golden statue is not the disease but the symptom of a country that has lost its older objects and sources of inspiration, community, solidarity, and devotion—and not yet found honest replacements.
I am not calling for the revival of any particular faith. I do not believe we can go backward, and would not if we could. I am only naming what I see. The hunger for worship will not go away. We will have to find saner ways of making meaning, healthier objects for our reverence.
Because Mar-a-Lago cannot be the American future.
Our poem today is by Robinson Jeffers, who sensed, decades ago, the ground going soft under the country.
—Terry
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Shine, Perishing Republic
by Robinson Jeffers
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhile this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenlyA mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruptionNever has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked on earth.