A long time ago, when Julie and I were still going to other people’s weddings, we received a postcard from New Orleans during one of that city’s many festivals. On the face of the postcard was a grand hotel, and a circle had been drawn on one of the hotel windows, and at the end of an arrow pointing to that circle were the words, “The Lucky Ones.”
The postcard was an update from a honeymoon, a notification that things were still going swimmingly.
The lucky people behind the circled window are divorced now, with grown children who have lives of their own. Luck is not a word they use uncritically anymore.
A wedding guest is a witness, one of those people invited to make sure the knot is tied in a public way. But the witnessing doesn’t stop when the honeymoon is over, even if the marriage ends.
Part of the reason Julie and I don’t go to weddings anymore is that irony is an uninvited guest. People get divorced about half the time, and it’s hard to tell which couples are going to separate and which aren’t. About all you can do is watch and find out.
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Watching and finding out. It’s a condition that speaks of innocence and powerlessness. A witness can’t control what is seen or heard, and can’t unsee or unhear it.
There are laws against trying. Witness tampering is the terrible crime of bending history to escape justice. Perjury is an equally terrible crime that suggests how easily witnesses can be tampered with.
But in the end, with laws or not, the past is not only immutable, it’s unforgettable. There’s a Picture of Dorian Gray in the attic of our unconscious, and its paint bubbles and blisters and cracks but never ceases to reflect what we’ve done and what has been done to us. The amount of effort we spend keeping it from consciousness is proportionate to the discomfort the picture causes us when we look at it.
The unconscious doesn’t forget what consciousness has denied. The unconscious is not given to flights of fancy, no matter how surreal its dreams. They are metaphors, and metaphors are always trying to add perspective to the real.
So, politics. Ron DeSantis explodes at a black man who says that he has turned black people into hunted prey in Florida, denying the fact that when a governor race-baits, people in his state will be scapegoated because of their race, and some of them will die. DeSantis may be able to fool himself about his motives, but he isn’t fooling the people who are encouraged by his dog-whistling, or their victims.
The trouble with being a witness is that innocence and powerlessness may seem like liabilities, but they’re essential requirements of remembering. If you try to do something about, say, the injustice you see, you’re no longer a reliable recorder of events.
The wedding guest who takes seriously the invitation to object to the ceremony is a stock comic character in movies about weddings (cf. The Graduate), but a pathetic embarrassment in real life.
If witnessing didn’t allow us access to reality, we wouldn’t have so many protections for it. It’s not too much to say that law exists so people can tell the truth. Juries act as witnesses after the fact to crimes, with special protections for their innocence and ability to say what really happened. Prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys at least pay lip service to impartial justice. “Tell it to the judge” is a phrase that assumes a mechanism exists for retrieving the truth from the past.
The implication of all these things is that the truth requires a witness.
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In 2016, this country entered into marriage with Donald Trump. However distasteful it may seem to you (or your spouse, if you have one), Trump became this country’s husband, in the traditional senses that he was a manager of resources and the authority in the household.
In 2020, there was a divorce. Infidelity, emotional and physical abuse, poor communication, criminal behavior, broken promises, and dereliction of husbandly duty all contributed to the breakdown of the marriage.
The honeymoon had ended quickly. Lots of people who had voted for Trump no longer felt like the Lucky Ones by the morning of his inauguration. By the morning of the next election, more people wanted out of the marriage than in.
There were others, however, who thought that since Trump appeared available to anyone who would have him, they might have a chance at sharing his lifestyle. Never mind that his other marriages had failed. Those would-be spouses are still out there, showing off their engagement rings and insisting that cubic zirconium has more flash than diamond anyway.
Marriage to a country is, of course, a metaphor, and a particularly awkward one in this case. But it helps to illuminate the anger and disappointment of Trump’s still-faithful helpmates when the divorce went through.
The worst of his supporters admitted that Trump was an abuser, but they suggested that his victims (the country and its democracy) had it coming. The worst of his detractors said that Trump had never taken the marriage seriously, and his oath was broken even before it was spoken.
The situation was reminiscent of wedding guests when confronted with a bitter divorce. They divide into the husband’s friends and the wife’s friends and go at each other.
No one sees any point of view but their own. Nobody ascribes intelligence or sanity to the other side. Both sides stop being witnesses to what had gone on and is going on, become blind and deaf, and start making judgments without regard to the facts. In the absence of reliable witnesses, what really happened is lost amid the shouting.
We’ll be facing the same situation in the 2024 election, and I’m predicting the confusion and anger and name-calling will excise the Constitution from our moral universe. At best, we’ll endure four more years of “Not My President” screams from half the country, and the division of families and communities into mutually abusive camps.
At worst, we’ll have a repeat of the war in Ukraine, where people fight to the death over money, land, houses, children, and their own terribly limited views of what the world is all about.
If the people calling for a civil war could spend a month or two on the front lines in Ukraine, the latter alternative would become a lot less likely. War as anybody’s good idea seldom survives beyond the first weeks of combat and dead civilians. Any reliable witness will tell you that.
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If you’re reading this, you’re likely married to fossil fuels and can’t imagine a life without them. You’ve paid your electric and gas bills and thereby voted for the Business As Usual For As Long As It Lasts Party.
You’re at war with the weather, and although you’re probably not on the front lines, you have seen the floods and the droughts and the heatwaves on the news, the melting permafrost and the bubbling methane, the dead livestock and the burned houses, the walls of flame above forests, the refugees and their thousand-yard stares.
You may not have thought about the weather as an empire in the Soviet mold, but it is. If you rebel against it, you should know that it’s got all the weapons and all the troops. It’s perfectly willing to kill you.
Your insurance company is not exactly your friend, but it will tell you that truth, at least, when it cancels your policy.
But you’re still on the honeymoon. You’re still sending out postcards. The air conditioning still works. You’re not a witness to anything but your own luck and the room service menu.
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Here are some metaphors that aren’t as awkward as the reality they illuminate:
The marriage of humanity and fossil fuels has produced too many children.
The wedding cost so much most humans won’t have enough money for a rent deposit on an apartment.
The weather is conducting a summer offensive in the form of a rise in ocean temperature. Casualties are already coming in from the front.
Democracy is a casualty of war, simply because people get deeply scared when they start losing homes, loved ones, and jobs. They lose faith in the ability of language to reflect reality. They turn to more trusted forms of government, like the mafia.
Despite evidence that fossil fuels have turned abusive, and the resource wars that are occurring across the planet (the Ukraine War is one of them), in this country we are still the Lucky Ones. We are at the tail end of a huge boom caused by fossil fuels. It’s not quite over yet, for us.
We can, however, witness that it’s over for other people in the world. All it takes is a look out the hotel window. It’s no wonder that we might want to spend our whole lives in the honeymoon suite, although I can imagine after a month or two it might require a mantra: “We’re Lucky. We’re Lucky. We’re Really Really Lucky.”
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Twenty-seven years ago, Julie and I went on our honeymoon without ever once calling room service. That’s because we didn’t stay in hotels that had room service. We were in Thailand, visiting places I had first visited fifteen years before, and I had taken pride in not spending more than $1.50 a night for lodging. It is to Julie’s credit that she insisted on establishments with flush toilets after the first night without one.
We did send home a few photos and postcards, but if we had put ourselves in them, we would have been arrested. They were mostly of Buddha statues. There are a lot of them in Thailand, and if you know what’s good for you, you don’t climb on them. You don’t deface the postcards by adding stick figures of yourself climbing on them.
To do so is to disturb the hard-earned serenity of the Buddha, a serenity arrived at by the sad understanding that our world of things is illusion, and that worldly pleasures are fleeting and ultimately lack the substance that worldly jails possess.
Still, if you’ve been raised in Western Culture, it’s hard to stop seeking worldly pleasure. It’s hard not to desire nice hotels, gourmet food and wine, travel insurance, political power, fast cars, rock ‘n’ roll, jet travel, flush toilets, and the peculiar form of room service known as Amazon.
Our honeymoon looks positively spartan these days.
It would have been better for the planet and democracy and social justice if humans had all been Buddhists rather than capitalists, but that’s hard to imagine as long as fossil fuels are powering civilization’s dance around the bonfire. Buddhists themselves seem to have joined the dance.
Humanity, to survive, needs to get to work on the everyday measures of prudence and conservation and restraint that make for a sustainable marriage with the planet. It won’t happen. We’ve witnessed enough.
It’s not going to last.