Not Dead Yet

America’s 250th is a day for celebrating the defiant pulse of the living.

One might think, given Trump’s propensity to plaster his name on everything, that he’s obsessed with legacy. He is, insofar as it’s the way to advance the game of writing one’s name upon the world (in, as always, the most stupidly literal way possible). But his long-term plan is closer to the opposite of planning for posterity. He cannot creatively envision a future in which he is no longer the main character, except to hate and fear it. He is going un-gently into that good night — and once he’s gone, as far as he’s concerned, everybody’s party might as well be over.

Our president is trying to take America down with him.

There’s been a few years’ worth of chatter around the phenomenon of MAGA’s “death drive,” or “suicide rightism.” What’s with the alt-right love for seppuku-committing ultranationalist author Yukio Mishima? Why did DHS post a video of the penguin who walks off to its seeming doom in Werner Herzog’s Arctic documentary with the caption “Americans have always known why”? Why does Pete Hegseth say “lethality” like it’s not the means but the end? I dismissed some of this (minus Hegseth) as would-be edgy manifestations of masculinity in crisis…until realizing that the commander-in-chief is on the same page, which explains a lot.

What does a death-driven administration look like, aesthetically? It looks like blood sport on the White House lawn. It looks like one failed attempt after another to wrest control of nature, from a paved-over rose garden, to a scum-choked reflecting pool, to a coterie of human bodies shellacked to parodic levels of denial of decay. It looks like the inability to attract crowds for, much less successfully host, anything resembling a celebration of life. The president’s charisma may play on the airing of grievances–to–riot incitement bandwidth, but collective joy is beyond him.

What do such an administration’s policies look like? They look like turning off the lights of knowledge and memory one by one, much like an unspecified 79-year-old sliding into senescence. They look like the antithesis of life: brutality in the streets, inhumane detention conditions, murder. They look like climate change denial and the rapacious stripping of environmental regulations. They look like antagonizing the UN and eliminating USAID, starting tariff wars with allies, and a literal war in the Middle East that scuttles a nuclear détente.

Many watchers have been baffled by Trump’s diplomacy because it is so flagrantly shortsighted; the Occam’s razor explanation is that he does not care about the long term. As though riding one of his once-buddy Musk’s privatized rockets, Trump is getting as far into the stratosphere of kleptocratic wealth as he can by burning through every bit of goodwill/democratic norm/actual hydrocarbon that it took 250 years to produce (or, in hydrocarbon’s case, far longer). Which is fine if you simply do not care about the place or the people you’re leaving behind.

I’m sorry to mark our 250^th anniversary by recapping the horrible present. But it’s necessary to put into context just how much this administration has no business celebrating a milestone of national life and evolution, a date that should serve as the springboard for hard-fought, generative discussions about where we’ve been and where we’re going. That’s what anniversaries are for, if used well.

They’re just another date, but in bearing the shape of a pivotal moment, they invite us to remember that we can choose any moment, this one included, to turn in the direction of progress.

The administration has never wanted to look candidly back, and it is becoming increasingly clear that they have no interest in or capacity for looking ahead. The far right is adrift in a curdling fantasy of an America with a past that never existed and a future that even they, it seems, don’t care to stick around for.

Luckily, they do not represent the America that has survived this long.

Here’s what life looks like. It looks like Kansans welcoming Algerians and Minnesotans standing up to ICE. It looks like a Knicks-inspired ode to pluralism and 8 million people marching against kings. It looks like the Seneca Falls Convention, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the March on Washington. It looks like Good Trouble and Stonewall and rock n’ roll. E.B. White defined democracy as, among other things, “the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles” and “the feeling of vitality everywhere.” That defiant pulse is with us still.

I’ve found myself thinking lately of a poem by Lucille Clifton, “wont you celebrate with me.” After limning what it is to be a Black woman in this country, the speaker ends with a fierce invocation to celebrate the fact that, every day of her life: “something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”

That’s enough to celebrate this July Fourth. And we have much more. The forces of dull, narrow imagination and greed have failed to take this opportunity for joy and reflection from us (however much they muddle the Reflecting Pool), just as they have failed to take our future. They are the ones passing through and away.

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