You may have read about or heard in passing about “dark matter” and “dark energy,” because they are the most famous and confounding problem in physics. It turns out that after discovering the atom, its constituent parts, their constituent parts and after humans have described a staggeringly deep and provable picture of what everything is made of, we learned in the not too distant past that there’s more – much more – we can’t see or measure. Dark matter is now said to comprise 85 percent of the universe, yet we don’t know a thing about it. We are more in the dark than we like to admit.
I think on this as I sit with you in a state of limbo and bewilderment about the 2020 election. I look out my door, at my neighborhood, my city and my country and its lived reality, the people I encounter, just doesn’t square in any reasonable way with the numbers on my TV screen or the rules of human behavior as I understand them. I have a dreadful sense that I’m seeing an illusion. My confidence in cause and effect itself is shaken. Joe Biden may well win the election in the next few days, and we were warned that we’d not have clarity on Nov. 3 unless there was a wave or a blowout. Yet it’s so deeply distressing that with tens of millions of early votes and unprecedented participation, this wasn’t a repudiation of Trumpism. We probably don’t take the Senate. And of course, Trump may well win another four years, as horrifying as that is. Trump has already banked four million more votes nationally than he did in 2016. After four years of the nation (the nation I see) reeling in disbelief at malevolence and incompetence of historic proportions, half of an engaged country said ‘yeah, let’s have more of that.’ Their motivations are either obviously contemptible (racism, Q-Anon conspiracy) or downright unfathomable. Whether measured by the Golden Rule or self-interest, what provokes this warped idea of how the United States should be governed and represented on the world stage?
I am tempted more than ever, even if Biden pulls this out, and I pray fervently that he does, to just bail on this life-long interest of mine in civic affairs. We’ve become a degenerate democracy, unkind and uncaring, impervious to experience or evidence. I got excited about politics and policy because it was, in the 1980s, still mostly a contest of ideas. Now it’s a power play supported by gun nuts with big trucks and a largely vacuous television ecosystem of politics as reality show. I can only handle so much nihilism in the mix. I expect I’ll be diving more into records and books as I grow old. I’ll dwell more on my esthetic passions and my family and friends. I’ll try to find ways to improve Nashville. But Republicans have flooded our Congress and the White House with contempt and control, and that’s not a fight I’m equipped for. The secretaries of state and election officials doing their best in this extraordinary moment are a sign of hope. So is the community I know and live in. But united states? Seems a long way off. - CH