My ears are ringing and let’s not even talk about my mind

For Americans, these are fraught days until November 5. As you may have heard, we have a presidential election coming up and it is the most rancorous and significant one in my nearly 71 years. There is in America a pervasive sense of a nation coming apart, and we have invested much of our dread, fear, and anger on the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.

Perhaps overinvested. None of us can predict how much havoc Donald Trump might unleash and how much damage he could do, but everyone I know is convinced that a Republican victory will be the end of our democracy, and that a Democratic victory will be met by weeks of legal wrangling and probably street violence from the Far Right. I suspect both potential outcomes are exaggerated. Won’t be long before we find out.

I was born in 1953, which means my parents got to enjoy my adolescence in the Sixties. Part of their enjoyment was, night after night, calling from another room, “Turn the music down, please.” (They were nice people and rigorously courteous, but that gentle admonition was still a command.) America began to get loud in the mid-1960s. Really loud. It began with popular music. For sure, were you dancing 20 feet from a 1940s swing band, the music was loud; so was an orchestra barreling through the climax of the Shostakovich Fifth. But by 1967, engineers had figured out how to create sound systems that permitted a few skinny, hairy guys in dumb clothes to damage the hearing of thousands of people at a time. The kids loved it. I loved it. My hearing now requires assistance. There ya go.

Sure, there were other ways to ruin your ears. Factories could be deafening, as were rail yards, airports, teeming city streets, and, as millions learned the hard way, warfare. But in the Sixties rock ’n’ roll brought the loud to an American culture that seemed primed to embrace the garish, the vulgar, the rude, and the aggressive. And the violent.

As the post-Sixties decades unspooled, the loud became pervasive. The loud and brutal National Football League supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Films with bombastic soundtracks became ever more violent as they played to America’s creepy obsession with guns; film music that used to be created by serious symphonic composers gave way to mediocre, pounding pop songs. As music producers coped with the reality of streaming—grab a listener’s attention in the first 10 seconds or they’ll move on—dynamics disappeared and every song got louder from the first bar. The sort of singing that won American Idol and The Voice infected Broadway musicals; watch a few recent broadcasts of the Tony awards and you will hear Sondheim replaced by aural blunt trauma.

If loud pertained only to decibels it would be bad enough. But there’s all manner of loud. Slogans have replaced arguments and slogans are loud. Advertisers buy every available surface—watch professional sports and count the ads on uniforms and even on the ice at a hockey game, ferfucksakes—and advertising is loud. Political commentators shout at us 24 hours a day; campaign signs are increasingly vulgar and vulgarity is loud. Beefy idiots in Proud Boys t-shirts and GI Joe tactical gear are loud. Those movie superhero franchises are loud. Aggressive, speeding, weaving drivers are loud. (People routinely refuse to stop for school buses now, and here’s this from the Washington Post: “Across the country, the number of people injured or killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018.”) Deadly sweet 500-calorie coffee drinks are loud, the landscape crews that work on my street six days a week are loud, the garish oversaturated photographs that dominate art-and-craft fairs are loud, restaurants are loud, fellow travelers on my most recent wilderness trips cannot shut up, and the internet fucking blares at me every day.

That was a loud paragraph. Sorry.

Okay. So what. What does a self-indulgent rant have to do with Tuesday’s US presidential election?

The problem with loud is that loud obliterates nuance. Loud is only loud, without depth, complexity, subtlety, all the fine distinctions that make possible art and meaningful inquiry and political discourse and progress toward justice. Problem enough. But there’s a bigger one: craving the loud and the need to be loud are characteristic of prolonged adolescence, and Americans need to grow up before the kind of dumb stunt teenagers pull in a car puts our entire democracy into a tree. Somehow, the American electorate has embraced politicians who govern as if the White House and the US Congress and state capitols were 8th-grade lunchrooms. To call current political discourse sophomoric gives it too much credit. Never in my years have I seen such an appalling collection of major political figures, all of them as childish as hormone-addled teenagers and all of them loud. Faced with climate catastrophe, the threat of another global war, and massive inequality and injustice, our political and business “leaders” conduct themselves like 14-year-olds on a Red Bull binge.

Venal, amoral, cynical adolescent punks have shoved the grownups from the room, and I have no answer but to vote and volunteer for Harris-Walz phonebanks and blow off steam here. How do you turn down a culture’s volume? Beats me.

I remember, from my teens and twenties, arena concerts where the bass and drums rattled my rib cage. I miss that thrill. But it was an adolescent thrill. Adult life is so much richer. If we’d just spin the cultural volume knob counter-clockwise, if we’d just shut up and listen, we might hear the smart, wise, responsible people who continue to try to save us from ourselves.

Perhaps we will. If I were as pessimistic as all of this sounds, I suppose I wouldn’t vote, but I did vote and I’m not packing for Toronto or Oslo or Svalbard. I will ride out the next few years with the rest of my exasperating tribe and hope that the occasional wise adult voice rises above the din.

We’ll talk again Wednesday morning if my joggled mind is up to it. Meanwhile, hand me the cocktail shaker and turn the music down, please.