34 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
and demand protections, violence ig-
nited. In 1914, the National Guard
stormed an encampment of workers in
the Colorado coalfields, causing a rifle
battle and setting tents on fire, killing
eleven children and two women. The
historians Philip Taft and Philip Ross
later wrote, “The United States has had
the bloodiest and most violent labor
history of any industrial nation.”
Hofstadter noted that in America,
unlike the rest of the world, political vi-
olence rarely involved poor citizens ris-
ing up against a powerful state; more
often, citizens attacked one another, and,
usually, the attackers were established
Americans—white Protestants, in many
cases—turning on minorities, immi-
grants, “Catholics, radicals, workers and
labor organizers.” Hofstadter made note
of “verbal and ideological violence” that
laid the foundation for actual harm. He
also fretted about a “rising mystique of
violence on the left.” By 1969, the Stu-
dent Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee, a civil-rights group co-founded
by John Lewis, had elected new leader-
ship and dropped “Nonviolent” from its
name. The usually staid New York Re-
view of Books had featured an instruc-
tional diagram for making a Molotov
cocktail. On both the left and the right,
Hofstadter sensed, politics was giving
way to a culture of self-expression suited
to the rise of television, in which the
“distinction between politics and the-
atre has been deliberately blurred.” Prac-
titioners had figured out that what played
well on TV was often the language and
the imagery of force.
N
eil Postman liked to explain Amer-
ican history as a sequence of met-
aphors, which, he wrote, “create the con-
tent of our culture.” Each era had its
own: the Western frontier, Upton Sin-
clair’s urban slaughterhouse, and even-
tually the gilded illusions of Las Vegas.
Postman died in 2003, but he might have
found the central metaphor of contem-
porary American culture in the era of
“twilight” warfare, which began on Sep-
tember 11, 2001, and extended to Af-
ghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria,
and at least nine other countries where
U.S. troops were dispatched under the
banner of fighting terrorism.
The language of conflict blended
with entertainment and bled back into
politics. In 2006, Laura Ingraham, the
conservative commentator, cited the TV
series “24,” which featured frequent de-
pictions of torture. “The average Amer-
ican out there loves the show ‘24,’” she
said. “In my mind, that’s as close to a
national referendum that it’s O.K. to
use tough tactics against high-level Al
Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”
At times, the war came home, cap-
tured in headlines about a foiled plot or
a radicalized “homegrown” terrorist. But,
for most Americans, it was an abstrac-
tion, fought far away from what was
now routinely described as the “home-
land.” In the twilight war, Americans
had acquired an enemy that felt invisi-
ble but ever present, everywhere and
nowhere, threatening enough that any
measures became permissible. Geogra-
phy and details became incidental. More
than three years into the Iraq War, a
National Geographic poll found that fewer
than a quarter of Americans with some
college education could locate Iraq, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, and Israel on a map.
The peril of ignorance is a perennial
American lament. Less than a genera-
tion after the founding of the country,
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If a nation ex-
pects to be ignorant and free, in a state
of civilization, it expects what never was
and never will be.” But, by the early years
of the twenty-first century, Americans
were no longer surprised by annual re-
ports that showed our students falling
behind other countries’. In a 2005 sur-
vey, two-thirds of Americans could not
name the three branches of government.
Scarcely a third of high-school seniors
read at or above the level of proficiency.
Americans were not just losing their
grip on the basics of science, civics, and
cultural knowledge; they didn’t seem to
care. In 2004, an aide to George W.
Bush (widely identified as Karl Rove,
though he denied it) dismissed the
“reality-based community,” by which
he meant people who insist on incon-
venient facts. “We’re an empire now,”
the aide told the journalist Ron Sus-
kind, “and when we act, we create our
own reality.” Magical thinking was tak-
ing its place on the main stage of poli-
tics. Bill Moyers, in a speech on end-
times rhetoric in evangelical politics,
lamented, “One of the biggest changes
in politics in my lifetime is that the de-
lusional is no longer marginal.” In the
2008 book “The Age of American Un-
reason,” Susan Jacoby declared, “Amer-
ica is now ill with a powerful mutant
strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-
rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”
WAYS OFBEINGLONELY
Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.
Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union.
You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.
That time with him in Houston.
Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.
An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar.
You stand in a shallow creek and your reflection floats slowly
downstream without you.
Alcohol is your emotional-support animal.
The fan hums erratically.
An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the
baggage carrousel.
