One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.
So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers — a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.
Immensely energetic and a lifelong activist for literacy and informed thought, this cigarette voiced Northumberland librarian has built the county's new little library, and even managed to coax enough money out of the local government for two employees. In a county with a population of 12,000, that's no small political feat.
At the moment though, politically speaking, the Obama-Hillary dirt fight is in full fury, so I asked the obligatory question of the week, "Who will you vote for?"
"Oh, Obama, I guess. It's so hard to get excited over the elections. Lately I've been just plain depressed," she said.
"About what?"
"Oh just everything. It seems to have become so pointless in America, as if we are entering a Dark Age. I've come to wonder why I do anything at all."
On that melancholy note, we return to the lounge to join my wife for that last drink. The next one always of course being the "last one," in the early stages of these situations, before all pretense is dropped and people start taking off their clothes or falling off those infernal high stools that replaced good old fashioned chairs — the kind where your feet reach the floor at all times and with arms you could grip if the room starts spinning.
Over the past couple of years I've had hundreds of encounters with reading Americans — and by encounters I mean conversations, not falling off chairs — which is to say book loving, thinking people like the Northumberland librarian, people of every stripe. They have ranged from the good ole boy Texas electrician who took me to a real smoke choked pool-table-and-concrete-floor joint to professors of literature and Washington policy wonks who actually use the little red cocktail napkin that accompanies their martinis.
During this period I have noticed a change in the nature of discussion with these previously unmet readers. Four years ago, much of it centered on the outrageousness of the Bush administration, the stomach turning criminality of the Iraq War, Cheney The Fanged Man of Wax, with a little rage at our planetary ecocide thrown into the mix. In other words, about what you might expect from a baby roasting alien commie readership such as mine, made up of such folks as school teachers, union members, sociology profs and other congenital malcontents, the sort of people who resent things like student strip searches in public high schools (HR 5295, The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006, which, to its credit, at least bans cavity searches by faculty. You gotta be a cop to do that in our public schools) and other subversive types.
Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue." Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it's true.
I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."
Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.
Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it's too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: "If we fucked everything up so bad tryin' to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave'er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much."
