The Phoenix

 As I wrote yesterday, Thursday evening's debate must have been the nadir of the presidential campaign. The absolute pits. No worst there is none. 

Already by the afternoon, however, we had started to pick up the pieces. The mood was shifting. Biden gave another speech before a smaller audience in which he was reportedly much more energetic. "When you get knocked down, you get back up," he said: and he actually seemed to have done so. Maybe—we dared to think—we could start to hope again. 

Perhaps that horrifying debate truly was a one-off. Maybe Biden was just tired and worn-down from the debate prep, and the event was held too late in the evening. 9 PM may simply have been after his bedtime. It certainly was after mine. 

So I'm starting to allow myself to feel some sense of emotional normality again. But still—I will probably never forget how sharp the pain was of that evening and the morning after. It was hard for me in the moment even to articulate what felt so personally wounding and hopeless about it. But by this morning, I think I knew:

Watching Biden stumble and flail through what should have been obvious refutations of Trump's baseless claims—watching him miss every opportunity that came his way—I realized how helpless we all are. No one is coming to save us. Our institutions will not protect us from the threat Trump poses. The latter is intent on dismantling our democracy, and that democracy is not prepared to defend itself. 

Thinking of Biden's gaunt and haggard face up there, a line from Shelley came into my mind: "An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King." Shelley used this image as a metonym for the decaying and corrupted political state of England, two centuries ago. And so too, what better image of the enfeebled condition of our liberal democracy could we ask for, than to see its only representative—its last defender and protector—stammering through the debate up there the way Biden did on Thursday night? 

But I went back to look at that poem of Shelley's again, from which the line is taken. And I saw that it ends on a note of prophecy that I had forgotten. To be sure, Shelley rattles off a long list of signs of mouldering, decay, and putrescence afflicting the state—evidence, we might say, of "old England's winding-sheet," as Blake once put it—or of the grave-clothes that Heine's spinners were weaving for the Germany of his era... all signs that such an unjust state cannot long continue. 

But then, Shelley ends with an image of the phoenix of hope that will rise from all this misery and decay. Such things, he writes, "Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may/ Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day." 

In other words—something good may come of all this that we cannot yet foresee. No matter how bitter the last few days may have felt, they may be the prelude to something better. And so, we have no choice but to keep going, in expectation of this future. "When you get knocked down, you get back up," as Biden put it. And that is what we will have to do.