Slouching toward disaffection

From 1967 through 1972, I was supposed to be disaffected. Those were the years of my adolescence, the years of middle school and high school in a small working class Ohio town near Cincinnati. As a teenager, I was supposed to be a mercurial, hormone-addled ball of surliness and insecurity and restiveness, one day endearingly goofy, the next insufferable, chafing at supervision but prone to stupid decisions in its absence. Plus, note the years. I came of age in the 1960s, when disaffection, and dancing at its fringes, became a youth national pastime in these United States.

I must have missed something. I sailed through those years as one of the happiest kids in town.

I was attracted to disaffection, especially in the popular music and films of the day, because disaffection was cool. Dylan was cool, Keith Richards was cool, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were cool. But I never embraced their disaffection. So long as most people left me alone to pursue my random walk through life, I was content. As a kid I did not so much confront authority as develop a knack for sliding around it. Assistant principals, teachers, counselors, coaches, scoutmasters, and assorted would-be role models all talked at me and I pretended to listen. Then I went off and did whatever I wanted, preferably alone. I was a polite kid who got good grades and seemed “well-rounded”—considered essential at the time, for some reason—and I was popular, so I think the adults usually missed how often I silently regarded them as jerks, buffoons, or complete idiots. I did not need for them to know. It was easier if they did not. I was all about the smooth ride.

I could be so blithe for two reasons. One, my empathy was, to put it mildly, in the larval stage. I was not ignorant of other people’s pain, frustration, and injustice, but it made little impression on me. I had an intellectual awareness that my good fortune was not so common, but not an emotional awareness. The young are self-absorbed, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room and my books and my head. All that reading may have improved my mind but I do not think it did much for my character. That would take time. The other reason for my complacency was that no matter how irritating I might find the social consensus, I rarely felt estranged from anything. My parents had their flaws and demons, but they loved me and I loved them. Never did I feel not part of my family, my friends, my school, my community, my country. These were all my people. Even the idiot gym teacher.

No longer.

With bemusement on good days and dismay and dread on bad ones, I now face how alienated I have become from contemporary American society and culture. My society and culture. The disaffection that was supposed to mark my life 55 years ago has landed like a stone. I feel like I live amidst strangers. I am jolted daily by people who have been friends for 60 years. By members of my own family. By people on my street. Did I ever know them? “Of course” has been replaced by “I don’t know.”

Disaffection elected Donald J. Trump. More than 77 million Americans felt—well, they felt many things, but I think they felt unseen. I cannot be sure because I did not see them, either. So I speculate. They no longer felt part of the transactional web that is an economy. They no longer felt part of the long conversation that is a culture. They felt disregarded and disdained and out of options. Pandemic-scarred, short on money, tired of feeling anxious and on the margins, they cast their votes.

I figure that away from the rallies that let them blow off steam and feel better for a night, most Trump voters are no more mean or callous than the rest of us in our bad moments. But all the same, I suspect a good many also relished Trump’s additional promise of retribution. Disaffection promotes stridency.

For example: Out of disaffection, I have no problem writing, “Everywhere I turn I confront stupidity. Corruption. Venality. Cravenness. Indifference to suffering and injustice.” Okay. Then, putting the wide tarbrush back in the bucket, I calm down, try to think about who is really to blame here, and revise: Everywhere I turn I confront stupidity in state and national politics. Venality from people already absurdly compensated. Cravenness from corporate and university leaders who seem taken aback by the notion that principles and courage entail risk and exact a cost. Indifference to suffering and injustice from people who know better and might do better if they were not so pissed off. People with whom I have more in common than I want to admit.

I write down—not without a touch of satisfaction—more items on my personal list of grievances: Cheerful obedience to illegitimate authority. A volume and profusion of lies that beggars the imagination. Resistance to history and science and experience, resistance that trashes knowledge that took centuries for humanity to discover and conserve—replaced by a faith in superstition, rumor, and dogma worthy of an illiterate 12th-century peasant. Who deserves these barbs, and who does not? My disaffected self says, If the shirt fits, button it.

This morning, as on so many mornings, I feel foreign in my own land. Unwelcome, dismissed, suspect, threatened. I grudgingly admit the same might be felt by people who now look like my enemies. Who could really become my enemies as I ponder ways to legally overturn this corrupt, malicious government.

My wife urges temperance and wider consideration, and she is a smart woman. Fortunately, mind and emotion are in this together, so my mind can walk emotion back and remind myself of a few things. I found 100,000 likeminded souls when I marched in Washington, DC on April 5. I remain welcome in the homes of people I love. I regard being suspect as validation. As for threatened, I am 71 years old. I have seen a parade of prancing punks come and go. At the end of the day, I am not impressed. One danger of disaffection is withdrawal, participating in your own isolation. I refuse.

The word disaffection, as in “the absence or alienation of affection or goodwill; estrangement” seems to have entered English around 1595–1605. Maybe 10 years later, writers found the need for a transitive verb, “disaffect”: “to alienate the affection, sympathy, or support.” Note the historical context: England was struggling with transition from Elizabeth I to James I; the Gunpowder Plot had narrowly failed to blow up Parliament; Protestants and Catholics were at each others’ throats with violent and barbarous results; inflation and rising poverty and a burgeoning royal debt dragged down the economy, and whatever wealth it could generate found its way mostly into the coffers of the monarchy and aristocracy; and James I wanted and did his best to expand his power over Parliament. I will not belabor the parallels.

In Four Quartets: T.S. Eliot wrote:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul

Perhaps at this point there is no way to lucid stillness and transient beauty that does not pass through dim light and then darkness. I was hoping for a smoother path in my later years, but we deceive ourselves when we think we choose our own road. This one has rocks. At the DC rally, the crowd chanted at a courageous trans advocate, “We see you!” And at a brave immigrant advocate, “We see you!” But people like me do not see 77 million compatriots. That’s a wide gulf. The land bridge has disappeared under rising waters. A new span will take time and patience.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson once said, “I can only make sense of my unaccountable good fortune by assuming that it means I am under special obligation to make good use of it.” In this I have an advantage over a sullen 15-year-old. When I wake up every morning, I can say to myself, Just get up. You have work to do.