10 8.9.
When
everything
is abnormal,
social guidance
becomes
all the more
powerful.Illustration by R. O. BlechmanWeekly Standard- in- exile or William
McRaven or John Bolton telling Repub-
licans that it’s OK to vote against Trump,
RVAT has turned to Tom from Arizona
(‘‘I’ve been a Republican all my life, and
this November I’m voting for Joe Biden
for president’’), Kelly from Florida (‘‘Biden
has my vote because we need to do what-
ever we can to get that monster out of
the White House’’) and Josh from North
Carolina to grant permission. Scrolling
through the testimonials on RVAT’s web-
site, the message to Biden- curious Repub-
licans is clear: You are not alone.
That sense of belonging, after all,
was part of what propelled voters into
Trump’s corner in 2016. They may not
have seen many elected offi cials or émi-
nences grises getting behind Trump, but
they didn’t need to; it was enough to see
their friends and neighbors, or people
who looked like their friends and neigh-
bors, packing airplane hangars or lining
up outside arenas. Those crowds signaled
to potential Trump voters that the outré
reality- TV star they liked watching in the
debates — the one all the pundits dis-
missed as a novelty act — was, in fact, a
realistic candidate to support.
As Axelrod’s career attests, this kind
of social permission isn’t a rare thing to
try to off er voters. It’s fascinating, though,
to watch it happen at a moment like this.
Americans fi nd themselves seeking per-
mission for a lot of actions these days,
like abiding by (or fl outing) mask require-
ments and sending (or not sending) their
children to school. Things once viewed
as inconceivable are now unavoidable;
things once taken as givens are now in
doubt. The unfamiliarity of the moment
has also made its political possibilities
seem endless, ranging from drastic
public- health and economic measures
to aggressive changes in policing.
When everything is abnormal, social
guidance becomes all the more powerful.
That reassurance is what RVAT is trying to
provide. In an era of extreme polarization
and negative partisanship — one in which
political allegiances are determined less
by aff ection for one party than by hatred
of the other — the notion of a Republi-
can voting for Biden feels aberrant. But
there’s so much aberrant about America
right now that nothing, presented in the
right voice by the right messenger, seems
especially outlandish. Not even voting for
a tomato can.
Each of us carries a cord of hope through all our wandering days. Where it begins, when
we found ourselves leaving home — so many homes; or when we arrived, when consciousness
widened to possibilities of community — the cord grows stronger or frays. Juan Felipe
Herrera’s magnifi cent new poems in ‘‘Every Day We Get More Illegal’’ testify to the deepest
parts of the American dream — the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants
and futures that belong to all — from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate
song than any anthem stirring the blood.Screenland
Poem Selected by Naomi Shihab NyeNaomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her latest
book is ‘‘Cast Away,’’ from Greenwillow Books. Juan Felipe Herrera traveled the nation from 2015 to 2017
as the United States poet laureate and wrote about it in ‘‘Every Day We Get More Illegal’’ (City Lights
Publishers, 2020).i want to speak of unity
By Juan Felipe Herrera— i want to speak of unity that
indescribable thing
we have been speaking of since ’67 when I fi rst stepped
into LA
with a cardboard box luggage piece I was distracted by you
your dances askew & somersaults the kind you see at
shopping centers
& automobile super sale events — the horns &
bayonets most of all
I wanted to pierce the density the elixirs of everything
something
like Max Beckmann did in that restaurant painting of
’37 or ’38 exiled
from Germany banned & blazing black jacket — that
everything
in a time of all things in collapse
that embrace that particular set of syllables of a sudden
attack
or just a breath of a song the one I would hear back in
the early ’50s
when I walked the barren earth with my mother &
father the sound
of One when Luz still lived & Felipe still parted the red
lands
& no one knew we existed in the fi res the fl ames that
consume all of us
now