American Homeostasis

Report from a Country in Perpetual Crisis

Over the past decade I’ve had the peculiar experience, each time I return to the United States, of discovering that that country is, against all expectation, still there. It is the only country I really know, the only one whose metabolism I share, and so this perpetual rediscovery of its enduring reality should come, one might suppose, as a relief to me. Instead I always end up feeling as if the proof it so reliably delivers of its existence, with just the form and quality my exile dreams attribute to it, is itself a refutation of the faith I have in it.

This is the opposite of how things usually work. Empirical proof is supposed to buttress faith, not weaken it. Perhaps what this proof really establishes, then, is that a country just isn’t the sort of thing one ought to have faith in. My sophisticated readers will already know that a country is but an imagined community, a tax-extracting shakedown that legitimizes itself through fine-tuned myths, a collective illusion that it is the duty of the intellectual and the cosmopolitan to see right through.

But what can I say? These are my people. Here, now, upon just having returned from my first visit to the United States since the beginning of the Trump Restoration, is how I find they are faring…