Poets of the Event

 If the American people do decide to elect Donald Trump again, three weeks from now—future historians will be hard pressed to explain why exactly we decided to throw out our democracy after two and a half centuries of relatively stable existence. Don't believe any of the would-be sociological explanations they may provide. The United States didn't suffer defeat in any major wars on the eve of Trump's re-election. There was no obvious national humiliation. We were not experiencing a recession or widespread unemployment. Our economy was growing and remained the largest in the world. 

We had our share of valid grounds for discontent, to be sure; our society was still rife with many of the same inequities and dispossessions that had plagued it for the last two-and-a-half centuries—but that doesn't explain why now, why in 2024. Nor do people's legitimate grievances about society explain why so many collectively hallucinated that a raving narcissistic demagogue would solve any of them (especially since he had not managed to solve them the previous time he was in office, and in fact had left the country worse off and had tried to stage a coup on his way out the door). 

So no, don't believe whatever future historians retroactively try to explain our coming self-destruction by appeal to economic or social forces. What actually happened was something much more fundamental. It was a malaise at the spiritual, cultural level. Fundamentally, Americans were bored. Our dismantling of the pillars of our own institutions didn't have to happen. Those pillars had endured for centuries and were still holding up okay, considering. The fault was not in them, but in us. We were tired of looking at them. They filled us with ennui. We wanted to see what would happen if we pulled them down. 

Can a society really destroy itself through nothing more than a collective gesture of ennui?—just for something to do, just "for idleness," as a decadent character in Chekhov's The Seagull puts it, in explaining why he killed an unoffending bird (Aplin trans.)? Can a democracy be finished off purely out of a kind of existential acte gratuit, to borrow Gide's phrase? A classic novel by the French writer Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore, suggests that not only is this possible—it is all-but inevitable. A society that has lasted too long in a state of idle tension may indeed pull itself apart for the fun of it. 

Gracq's book (originally published in 1951) is often read as an allegory for the Cold War—since it concerns two hostile powers existing in a state of perpetual but uneasy truce. Yet, if that was truly Gracq's intention, he was remarkably prescient—for the two warring parties at the center of the book have been poised in this armed equilibrium for so long that they have practically forgotten the original causes of their dispute. It therefore reads more like something that would belong to the later decades of the Cold War—whereas in 1951, I would have thought the conflict still felt fresh. 

Regardless of the specific political context Gracq had in mind, though, his book speaks to our time as well. For his point is that a state of uneasy peace—a tacit understanding that preserves a status quo—can in fact endure for centuries. What ultimately disturbs it, he suggests, is not anything inherent in the terms of the equilibrium itself. It is not the fact that the peace has never been officially declared. There are no "internal contradictions" accelerating toward upheaval. Rather, what ultimately ends the peace is people's hunger for action; their "boredom," as he puts it. They end it willingly, unnecessarily—"for idleness." 

The protagonists of the events that ultimately unwind the stable equilibrium are those individuals whom one character dubs the "poets of the event." They come in various forms, in the novel. There are the traitors and agents provocateurs, who play both sides of the conflict in order to sow the seeds of war. There are the doomsday preachers in the city streets who predict annihilation (with something—as is often the case with apocalyptic preachers—approaching relish). And there are the licensed ministers of the state, who invoke Christ's metaphor: "I come not to bring peace, but a sword." 

Our protagonist is almost an unwitting actor in the forces that bring these vague hopes for destruction to their culmination. He moves by instinct, not by conscious choice—and, if he does in fact commit the fatal deed that brings the ultimate destruction to pass, his excuse, he says, is that he was merely enacting the subconscious will of the nation in doing so. Somehow, at some level, the country had decided it was time. It needed an event. It needed some propaganda of the deed. It wanted—as D.H. Lawrence put it in a poem—"to upset the apple cart/ And see which way the apples would go a-rolling." 

The protagonist's mentor, the old Captain of the distant outpost where the former is assigned (Gracq's book owes a great deal in its premise—including the frontier commission, and the endless war that never quite comes—to Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe)—this Captain tries to tell him that the apple-cart does not necessarily need upsetting—and that it may not be all fun and games to see the apples rolling—since those apples may be heads. He tells him that, strange as it may seem, peace can in fact endure. Even an imperfect, unofficially-declared peace—even an awkward "false situation."

The protagonist cannot accept this. Nor can the rest of the people of the city. They demand that life lead to something. The status quo enduring for an age, followed only by death, would to them be equivalent to depriving life of all meaning. They will have change even if it means the annihilation of themselves and their whole way of life. The preacher, in Gracq's novel, sounds a lot like J.D. Vance, in this regard. He compares the coming suicidal destruction to a pregnancy—the annihilation to a birth. And so, according to his metaphor, those who want to forestall the destruction are anti-child. "Cat ladies," if you will. 

The preacher accuses those who want to prevent the city's march toward self-annihilation of "complacency." He says they are the sort of people who simply want to go to sleep—to turn over and ignore real life, because it threatens to disturb their comfort. This, too, is the Trumpist argument often made against liberals who oppose the fascist revolution they have planned for us. "You just like things the way they are because it suits you," the Trumpists say. "You've grown complacent in your long-enduring democracy. Now we've come to rouse the nation from its slumbers!"

But what if, as the aged captain says, some forms of equivocal peace—some forms of slumber—some awkward situations—however imperfect—are preferable to some forms of wakefulness—such as war and universal self-annihilation? And—so long as we are throwing around accusations of complacency—what about the complacency of the J.D. Vances of the world, who think they can upset the apple-cart and still come out on top—who think they can pull down the pillars of democracy and yet somehow the temple roof will not come crashing on their own head? 

D.H. Lawrence had an apt line for people of that sort too: they may say they welcome "nihil"—but what happens when nihil "comes along and hits you on the head," he asks? "Why should the deluge wait while these young gentry go on eating good dinners for fifty more long years? Why should our Latter-Day sinners expect such a long smooth run [...]?" So too, why should Gracq's preacher think that he can call down the universal conflagration but not be caught in the flames himself? Why should Vance think the pillars he pulls down will not be like those of Samson? 

Is it really worth destroying it all, we ask them, just to lick boredom? Is life not short enough as it is—does boredom not have a natural enough terminus already—that we need to hasten it deliberately? It's not too late, you know—we could still call it off! This is what Gracq's protagonist pleads as well. "A gesture—one gesture, that's all," he says, "[...] and the world goes back to sleep." (Howard trans.) Just don't vote for Trump, America! That's all it takes! Just exorcise that ghost haunting our body politic. He will go back to his golf course, and our politics will return to its usual uneasy equilibrium of forces. 

A flawed peace our democracy would then be—but one that is preferable to unleashing destruction on our own heads. Perhaps it's not preferable for some, though—perhaps there are some so impatient with mere humanity and life as it is, that they would rather not live at all—people who, like Gracq's protagonist, simply find they cannot accept that life is just "Yesterday, and then today, and then tonight... and then nothing." Vance may be in that category. He may be one of those people who would rather burn it all down, just to see the flames dance, than spend another night in boredom. 

But if so, the ultimate selfishness is that he would impose his choice on the rest of us. For it is not his life only that his authoritarian experiment would destroy—but life for us all. It is not only the democracy he was born into—and toward which he has proven so ungrateful—which he would smite, but our democracy: the democracy that has endured for two centuries and a half, and that should not be cast aside so lightly. Those who regard boredom as the greatest evil perhaps do not realize how unusual that degree of stability is in human history, and therefore how precious and worth preserving. 

As the aged Captain says, in the novel: "it's a great feat just to be. Here. Now. [...] You don't know what a deliverance that is." (Howard trans. throughout.) To accept boredom is therefore not to accept sleep—it is to accept life, in all its imperfections, its dullness, its "false situations." And the craving for action, for the extinction of boredom, for the upsetting of every equilibrium, is not in reality a respect for birth, as Vance and the preacher in Gracq's novel mischaracterize it. It is, to the contrary, a death wish. Stripped of their rhetorical poses, the "poets of the event" are really the panegyrists of Thanatos.