A friend and I went to see a movie about Patti Smith recently at the Lincoln Theatre. It was playing as part of the DC Film Festival, and Patti and the director, Stephen Sebring, were both there. The movie was mostly images of Patti: singing, walking around, visiting the gravesites of poets she liked. Patti voiced-over nearly all of it, reading her poetry and sharing with us what I can only call “deep thoughts.”
Towards the end of the film, you see her wandering the crowds of a protest in Washington, D.C. as she calls for the indictment of war criminal, George W. Bush. Justifying it with the words of the Declaration of Independence itself, she calls for his removal. And in the words of a very bad song she then sang with her son, she reminds us: “the people have the power.” She’s right, I agree with her. So why do these protests feel so empty? Why, with our enviably protected freedoms of speech, press and association- freedoms that furnish us with protests short of riots, and marches short of coups- does our current practice of them seem so… pointless?
Some of the answer may be found in an essay I’ve just read by H. L. Mencken called “On Being an American.” While written in 1922, it is an apt mirror for our own times. Commenting on the fact that some Americans talk of leaving the country in protest, Mencken responds, with ridicule but also praise:
God forbid! I’d as lief have some poor working girl (mistaking the street number) leave twins on my doorstep. No one would weep saltier tears than I when the huge fleet of Mayflowers sailed away, bound for some land of liberty. For what makes America charming is precisely the Americans. … They are, by long odds, the most charming people that I have ever encountered in this world. They have the same charm that one so often notes in a young girl, say of seventeen or eighteen, and perhaps it is grounded upon the same qualities; artlessness, great seriousness, extreme self-consciousness, a fresh innocent point of view, a disarming and ingratiating ignorance…
Where, indeed, is there a better show in the world? Where has there been a better show since the Reformation? ... Consider, for example, the current campaign for Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more stupendously grotesque – a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee – the impossible, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy anyone to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least issues, ideas, personalities. Somebody says something intelligible, and somebody replies. It is important to somebody that the thing go this way or that way. But here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to a gaudy symbolism, to a disembodied transcendentalism, to metaphysics, that sweet nirvana…
And so it goes today: the candidates fill the airwaves with pomp and circumstance, promises of a new day. But does anyone take these tenth generation revolutionaries at their word? I hope not. It doesn’t even seem the point. In every campaign cycle the math adds up perfectly, and our massive slate is feigned clean. But on January 20th - and not before – we continue pretty much exactly where we left off. For this is the point. To shove on in our slow-moving, old reliable U.S.S. Democracy; our zenith of a status quo. Our own personal North Star perpetually shining directly overhead, leading us, happily, nowhere at all. Have a seat, she tells us, for you have arrived.
