{non-fiction}

The cliché is that we live in an age of anxiety, which is a nice and nicely telling way of saying we’re afraid. George Carlin once drew the lineage between ‘shell shock’ and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, and that’s it exactly: we’re so afraid of the idea of shell shock that we’re afraid of what we call it.

This surreal age of ours is even afraid of the word fear. As a euphemism, ‘anxiety’ has something else in common with ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’ They’re both clinical terms, meaning they have the wonderful oddity of being both precise and inaccurate.

Anxiety denotes a condition that can be treated – indeed, is meant to be treated. Post-traumatic stress disorder is so fucked up it has ‘disorder’ right in the name. You’re not shell-shocked; you have a disorder. There’s something wrong with you.
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At their best, Americans have shown the kind of existential courage that insisted on self-rule and faced down fascism with clear eyes. The revolutionary child of an unbroken chain of undemocracy, the first and best of its kind of government. 

And at the close of the Greatest War, when the most terrible evil of our age was finally defeated and its high perpetrators caught, the policy of Mother Britain was to have them hung by the neck until dead within six hours of their capture.

The confidence of the post-war years had its rhetorical beginnings in the wartime addresses of FDR. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ goes the famous presidential aphorism. Then fortitude gave way to giddy triumphalism, and a centrist brand of stagey optimism pervaded the speeches of every (two-term) President. Deviating from this course didn't usually bode well.

It's a strain that trickled down to ‘Morning in America’ by the Reagan eighties, and somehow found a deeper crevice in President Bush Jr.’s frequent assurances that he was an optimist. After all, we shouldn’t be afraid of a silly little thing like war. Fear, on the other hand, should scare the shit out of us.

Apocalyptic tales are all the rage these days, pretty much across the culture – not surprising perhaps for the current residents of an age of anxiety. The strange meditation of an essentially peaceful, even placid race of suburb dwellers is this: What happens if all of this safety disappears like a mirage and I wake up with my baby in one arm and a rifle in the other?

The first and most influential of this generation’s take on the end-times story might be The Matrix. Technology is front and center, as it should be in a time when there was a goddamn file card system in my grade school library and now my phone talks to space. It has a whole lot of guns. And best of all it grounds everything in the world’s oldest non-profession: philosophy.

‘Did you know that the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy?’ says the machine speaking to the human. ‘It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. …Human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was redesigned to this.’

Human battery in a computer wonderland aside, think about this: there were actual people in both the first and second matrixes. And you’ve got to wonder when they were more afraid.

American scholars like to point out how Americans are different from everybody else. I’ve heard more than one distinguished academic talk about what wouldn’t work for a red-blooded American, like a public health care system or drug treatment or gun control. What works for France or Finland or Canada or Germany or Japan or the Federated States of Micronesia simply does not apply to Uncle Sam’s brood.

There are 300 million guns in the U.S.; a majority of citizens are gun owners. The gun control lobby has given up on asking the government to make guns illegal. 

Guns in school are a thing; guns in church are a thing; concealed guns are a huge thing. Twenty toddlers were shot to death last Christmas, sixteen mass shootings happened last year, and a U.S. Congresswoman got a bullet in her brain the year before. If the shooters hadn't been born here, we'd be under attack.

The first and maybe the least popular of the lost generation’s take on the end-times story might be James Joyce’s last book. Technology has much less to do with it, and it takes a long time to get through. Sometimes you don’t quite understand what’s going on. There are no guns, and more disappointing still, no kung-fu.

‘History,’ says the man to the man, ‘is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.’

American history always seems to be a dream or a nightmare. Being awake is neither.

There’s a rhetorical device called reductio ad absurdum, where you take something that sounds reasonable and bring it to an extreme to show how absurd it really is. 

A lawyer once told me about a search and seizure law that he saw as a human rights violation: police wanted to retain the legal right to strip search everyone on the premises if there was reason to believe there were illegal drugs present. The case had come up after a drug bust at a house party in which dozens of people were strip-searched.

‘What would happen if the police applied that prerogative to, say, a football game – where there’s plenty of good reason to believe that someone in a crowd of twenty thousand people is doing drugs?’ pointed out the lawyer. 

The police commissioner replied, ‘If we did that, it’d be the greatest half-time show in history.’

When it comes to issues like drugs, or health care, or guns, reductio ad absurdum doesn’t seem to have the desired effect on American government.

In a country of 300 million guns, where your neighbor is likely a gun owner, and you read news about mass shootings every month or so, why shouldn’t you just pick up a gun yourself? Why shouldn’t good guys carry guns, as the NRA and the motherfucking Atlantic Monthly passionately advocate?

And let’s make something very clear: picking up a gun is not a social choice. It’s not voted on. It’s not illegal. It’s not a civic duty. It’s your – very personal – choice.

Whether you’re a gun rights advocate or not, the fact is that picking up a gun or not picking up a gun is a choice everyone has to make about their life. And it’s becoming disturbingly less metaphorical as this already exhausted millennium wears on.

The movie that philosopher Slavoj Zizek said ‘gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism,’ Children of Men is my favorite of our end-times stories.  It’s not about technology. There are no machines, no poetry. There’s not even any philosophy, really. There are a lot of guns.

Clive Owen turned down the part of James Bond, the boondoggle of a lifetime that ended up going to men’s magazine cologne sample Daniel Craig. Instead he took the part of a broken man in a deathbed world carrying a baby – in both arms.

It’s a thriller, which is the kind of movie where everyone is supposed to be anxious. In this kind of entertainment, you’re afraid the hero’s going to be hurt or killed, or that he won’t be able to accomplish what he sets out to do. True to form, there’s barely a scene in the movie where he’s not in immediate danger of being foiled or killed. And truer still to big, broad, James Bond-style thrillers, what our hero sets out to do is nothing less than save the world.

The world, as it so often does, takes the shape of a baby – the first child born in a generation and perhaps the last man has to offer. The good guys want the world; so do the bad guys. And throughout the intensely atmospheric, effective film, anyone with a gun points it at our hero sooner or later, and tries to take it from him. That’s every thriller, and it’s also every every story about what we’d be driven to if we safe sleeping people suddenly woke up.

I almost never cry at movies; I certainly never cry at James Bond movies. And so it was pretty hard to explain to myself, my wife, and her perplexed friends why I bawled my way through almost the entire running time of Children of Men.

It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out why the movie hit me so hard, but I finally found out why. For one end-times story in the age of anxiety, for two glorious hours in the history of the cinema, James Bond doesn't pick up a gun.

Moe from The Simpsons at an NRA meeting: 

‘A guy came in last night and tried to hold up the bar.’ 

‘What’d you do, Moe?’ 

‘Well it could have been a really ugly situation, but I managed to shoot him in the spine.’

Here’s what the lead prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal told Mother Britain:

‘The summary execution of Nazi perpetrators would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.’

That’s Robert H. Jackson, President Truman’s appointee and the ranking legal authority in the trial that brought the worst war criminals in history to justice. Alec Baldwin played him in the TV movie.

Bad guys always have guns, and sometimes good guys have to pick them up too. No one understood that better than our grandparents – (easily) the greatest generation. But you only stay good guys when you put them down again.

Ten years after perpetrating the first foreign attack on U.S. soil since WWII, nationless war criminal Osama bin Laden was shot to death by American commandos in his bedroom in an unknowing foreign country in the middle of the night. Before the American people even heard that he’d been found, his corpse had been buried at sea. The movie about it came out a year later. It was the best-reviewed film of 2012.

Here’s some low-hanging fruit for the George Carlin/Orwell list of telling euphemisms. The same year Greatest War President Truman won reelection, the government changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense.

After the murder of twenty children, the men who run the gun lobby waited a respectful week before reiterating their well-varnished bullshit, the kind we continuously pretend to be shocked by even though they pretty much never stop saying it. 

It goes something like this: Sure, there are bad guys with guns – and the only thing that stops them is good guys with guns.

Professional armed police officers are usually a full five minutes away from places where free people raise and educate their children, so taxpayers should endorse and pay for the raising of a national armed militia to patrol American schools.

In case you still don’t understand the idea of reductio ad absurdum, this is actually a much better example than the one I gave before. 

Among those un-ironically defending the rhetorical device-cum-actual argument is Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (by no means exceptional in his views), who writes that the logical thing to do when somebody is shooting at you isn’t to ‘cower and pray’ – it’s to shoot back.

After all, that’s what James Bond does. 

Here it is: there’s no such thing as any living thing being safe. Most animals have to worry about a lot of other animals possibly killing them; we mostly have to worry about other people. You know, bad guys.

Living in a country flooded with guns means the bad guys can pick one up any time they want. Sick, deluded, suicidal, even criminal – they just have to go to a gun show. And then, if they choose, they can kill you. Worse, they can kill your children. It's scary. It's supposed to be.

And we've given up on taking the gun away.

This is one of the many times when fear is nothing to be afraid of – and nothing to be ashamed of, either. I’m afraid of someone shooting me or people I love or people I don’t. But I'm more afraid of a country where the fear doesn't move us. I’m afraid for our peace, and our minds.

Our presidents don’t tell us this very often, but fear is natural. Fear is good. At the least, it tells us what we’re afraid of - and that gives us our direction. The truth is, we have nothing to fear of fear itself. It’s mourning in America. And I’m a pessimist.

God should be feared, and usually is. Death should be feared, and usually is. What's really scary is what we’re not afraid of anymore. As George Carlin once put it, the real pessimists are the ones who tell you everything’s going to be alright.

1/3/13