In a government system where people have confidence in a political pendulum, the fulcrum has apparantely misfunctioned

From hope to despair: A writer’s lament for our nation: Echo essay published in The Boston Globe by Leslie Epstein. 

What of the boy on the swing, the boy with the raisin cookie in his hand? So buoyant in his idealism and his faith in his country? He woke as an old man in November. His childhood now lies in shards at his feet.

The pendulum we study in physics broke in 2024 politics

There I was 6 years old, about to turn 7, happily swinging back and forth in the public park when my father came racing down the road, swept me up from my leather perch and, weeping the whole time, carried me up the hill to our house on Holmby Avenue in Los Angeles. What had happened? I learned soon enough: Franklin Roosevelt, a sort of God for all Jewish Deists, had died.

And there I was again, aged 10 and living in a new house on San Remo Drive, going from house to house to ask those living inside to sign a petition for Harry Truman’s presidential campaign. Thomas Mann, two blocks up, said he’d like to but could not; but Gregory Peck, five blocks up, did — and gave me a raisin cookie to boot. Then, while I was sleeping, came the miracle during the night of Nov. 2. I woke to discover that Truman, sure to be defeated by the mustachioed man on the wedding cake, had won.

I recall these two things because I think that taken together they implanted in my unformed brain — much as the first sight of any moving object is implanted in the head of a gosling: Mother! — a hard kernel of idealism about the world that had lasted until this past November election night. There really are great men, that was part of it, along with the notion that in the end what is good will triumph over what is not.

I was still only 10, or a bit younger, when I had to deal with the thick shadow that fell across my innocence. I first became aware of the fate of the Jews as World War II came to an end. Up to then the war itself had only reinforced the idea that the greatest struggles ended as they ought. We had a 16-millimeter camera at home — that’s how I first encountered “Casablanca,” written by my father and uncle, and “The Maltese Falcon” — and the first technicolor film I saw was called “The Fighting Lady,” which sailed in majestic combat across our living room floor. I felt safe, secure in the knowledge that no force would ever defeat a ship like that.

I was still only 10, or a bit younger, when I had to deal with the thick shadow that fell across my innocence. I first became aware of the fate of the Jews as World War II came to an end. Up to then the war itself had only reinforced the idea that the greatest struggles ended as they ought.  🕎✡️

We had a 16-millimeter camera at home — that’s how I first encountered “Casablanca,” written by my father and uncle, and “The Maltese Falcon” — and the first technicolor film I saw was called “The Fighting Lady,” which sailed in majestic combat across our living room floor. I felt safe, secure in the knowledge that no force would ever defeat a ship like that.

Then, pretty much during the Obama years, the pendulum seemed to break free of the rotation of the earth. Think of what the American male, white in color and straight in inclination, experienced in that era: a Black president and maybe a Black doctor pressing a stethoscope to his chest; women outnumbering men in every college and approaching equality in power and pay; men marrying men and women marrying women. An era? These tectonic plates moved beneath their feet in the blink of an eye.

Mr. Steglemeyer did not teach physics, but I already knew that in politics as in that field of science for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. So the election of Donald Trump did not surprise me. I dreaded it, but I expected it. And he governed like the reactionary he was meant to be until the normal gravitational impulses expelled him from office and — wait! The string on the pendulum snapped. The forces of reaction — using literal force — demanded that the rotation of the presidency, as constant as that of the earth, come to a halt.

Let us go back to the deathbed words of Herr Hitler and his propagandist. How could they be so confident that the ideals of National Socialism would return in a generation or two? I think that both men were privy to the great secret that lies at the heart of fascism: That might does make right, that the world we are born into is one where dog eats dog and man is a wolf to man.

Perhaps, Rodgers and Hammerstein had it backward: You don’t have “to be taught to hate and fear”; you’ve got to be taught to take part in the pantomime we call civilized life. What else are our great traditions and everything that makes up our culture — the cathedrals and the religion practiced in them, the art and the artists, the parliaments and palaces, and all the daily niceties and norms that in the end persuade a man to raise his hat from his head to the young lady he meets instead of pulling down her skirt.

The appeal of fascism, why it is the default position in political life, is that it not only allows everyone to get in on the joke but grants permission to hand over all requirements to think, make responsible decisions, and do the tedious work of citizenship. 

Instead, the leader will do it for us because he has in turn been granted the authority to act out everything we have been required to repress in ourselves: the cruelty, the quick act of violence, the worship of strength, the hatred of the other who all too soon will be denied full human status. Why were Americans, no less than the Volk of Germany, so eager to believe the one big lie? Because they have come to know the one big truth: that life, at bottom, is meaningless.

And that is how Donald Trump was reelected, and the prophecies of the Führer and the Reichsminister — already being fulfilled on four other continents — came to pass in our own land.

What of the boy on the swing, the boy with the raisin cookie in his hand? So buoyant in his idealism and his faith in his country? He woke as an old man in November to watch a nation commit suicide and the Fighting Lady run onto the rocks. His childhood now lies in shards at his feet. He is under that thick shadow, the one made of smoke.

Of course I always knew what human beings were capable of. Perhaps I didn’t even need to see the images on celluloid. Innocence is a willing delusion. One woman, a 100-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, kept her eyes wide open. After she told her New York Times interviewer of the horrors of Auschwitz, she stopped him as he turned to go. “Young man,” she said, “I want you to know that there are many good people in the world. But not enough.” And that is the knowledge the ghost of the child will live with as the Reichstag starts to burn.

Leslie Epstein teaches creative writing at Boston University.