J. B. Thompson

The AR imagines his vieux amis Virginie Lebeau and Francois de Paule. They are friends of Eric Satie. More than friends. They all live in a tiny apartment in Arcueil. Within is chaos. Two grand pianos are stacked one on top of the other, the top one used for storage. So many manuscripts, scores. The closet of white suits.

Can such a life and time be imagined now? Can music be written in the form of a pear? For and of furniture. As it was in the deceptive contemplative calm before the horror of the twentieth century.

The DIK wanders into the AR’s study. Sees the AR in one of his moods.

“You should go into the garden. Use the rake. Dig in the soil. Plant carrots.”

The DIK is wise.

It is a time of sad reckoning. The daily corona virus death toll in the USA now surpasses the deaths of 9/11, after epic mismanagement. The justice department is rushing to kill as many inmates on death row as possible before the new administration takes power. More than 600 children detained at the southern border in cages still cannot find their parents. A massive retrenchment of environmental safeguards continues in a time of dangerous climate change.

Notwithstanding this and other atrocities, in the 2020 election more than 70 million Americans voted for the most corrupt leader of a western democracy in history, having available to inform them a still functioning free press that initially, true, was slow to grasp the pathology of the leader and his enablers, but by the 2020 election has presented a vast if still incomplete catalogue of their crimes and misdemeanours.

In short, it is a time of madness and frightening decline, aligned with other moments in history: the periods leading up to the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, the Weimar Republic, disastrous falterings in Latin America and Africa, the English and American Civil Wars, the McCarthy era, times when delusion overtook populations and they rushed to the cliff.

How does a population go mad?

Three fine Atlantic articles by reliably thoughtful, sane authors discuss this pivotal time:

David Brooks’ The Rotting of the Republican Mind

George Packer’s The Legacy of Donald Trump

and for the beginning of a restoration of sanity,

James Fallows’ How Biden Should Investigate Trump

The AR recalls the words of scholar Tony Judt in a 2012 Penguin book of discussion, Thinking the Twentieth Century, between him and Yale history professor and author Timothy Snyder. Judt taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley, and was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University. In the book, published shortly before he died, Judt speaks of the nature of belief in the communist system and the two waves of disbelieving, those who fell away early and those like the Cambridge double agents who took longer.

“. . . the kind of truth that a believer was seeking was not testable by reference to contemporary evidence but only to future outcomes,” said Judt. “Communism also offered an intense feeling of community.”

What future outcomes imagine the deluded in the era of the Preposterous Pump? Is it more than greed and lust for power? Perhaps to retreat behind those walls into paradise like a childhood in post-WWII American and its brief time of peace and progress, when ordinary people could dream of improving their lot for themselves and their children, blind to underlying faults in their society that would come to the fore in later years: the racism, assassinations, war, inequity in the capitalist system that when unleashed would replicate those pre-revolution time bombs?

One thinks of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which is an indictment of the climate of financial scandal and cynicism he was shocked to encounter in the England of the 1870s when he returned from a long absence. The figure of the foreigner Melmotte, whose dream of becoming an English gentleman, a member of parliament, blinds him to his financial folly. He is an inveterate swindler; but before the dream takes hold of him, he had known when to take the money and run. This time, he is lost in his dream and he forgets, and when his empire collapses, it is to prussic acid he turns. For Dickens in Little Dorrit, the swindler is Mr. Merdle, the Man of the Age, who slits his throat when his scaffolding of lies collapses.

The Authorial Rabbit is not turning to any poisoned carrots. The vaccines are coming. It is time to learn from the recent past and restore that practical optimism and enterprise and decency that is the better and bigger part of our nature. One rabbit at a time.