Julie and I watched the inauguration last Wednesday. It was a surreal experience, sitting in Sawtooth Valley and watching Joe Biden address the country from the same Capitol steps where lately rioters had swung Confederate battle flags, fought and killed police, and battered their way into the building.
As if by magic, the Capitol had become a place where poetry and hymns were sung. It had become high enough moral ground that Donald Trump couldn’t be there, for fear of altitude sickness.
It was a place where Joe Biden could say he wanted to be a president for all Americans, even the ones who had voted against him. For me, the best moment was when Amanda Gorman, a twenty-two-year-old poet, embodied a brilliant hope as she read her poem detailing what it would take to finally lay down the burden our country’s history.
Julie was in tears of relief and joy for most of the ceremony, but I wasn’t. The last inauguration that brought tears to my eyes was Bill Clinton’s, and I remembered too well the way that turned out.
Clinton accelerated the move of U.S. manufacturing to China, Vietnam, and Mexico. He continued Reagan’s destruction of labor unions, one of the main supports of the American middle class. He put the country’s hopes and dreams in the incompetent but no doubt enthusiastic hands of Monica Lewinsky. Along the way, he showed us that an intelligent psychopath, one who had abdicated moral authority, could get re-elected to our highest office.
So even when Joe Biden called on Americans to live in a world ruled by Fate, one where our only human defense against a brutal universe was to need a hand or lend a hand, I didn’t cry. I just hoped that this time, our president wasn’t a psychopath.
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I taught college students for twenty-odd years, and Amanda Gorman brought back memories of hyper-intelligent young adults in my classes. I remembered people for whom my biggest contribution to their education had been to get out of their way. I remembered entire semesters where I had assigned a list of favorite books and then watched what happened when ten or twelve or fifteen good minds grappled with life-and-death ideas. I had learned that when a professor started dictating answers instead of asking questions, mediocre students took a lot of notes and thinking students got bored. I saved my deep attention for the thinkers and learners and let the others keep up as they could.
Amanda Gorman interested me because she wasn’t singing poetry that was cynical or enraged or bored. Those are popular choices for a lot of our young writers these days, especially ones who have been reduced to serfdom or paralyzing anxiety or dull resignation by educational loans. (Future historians, if there are any, will record that banks and colleges and universities reintroduced slavery in the United States with easily acquired and impossible to retire college debt.)
But Gorman’s professors, her family, her fellow students, and her own clear ambition had brought her to this point, standing on the steps of the Capitol, reading her work to the president of the United States. A lot of people had helped her to get there. None of them, as far as I could tell, had convinced her that her horizons had limits.
She still has a long way to go. She wants to run for president in 2036. What had been Robert Frost’s career peak, and Maya Angelou’s too, is for her merely a foothill.
To listen to someone that confident and still quite aware of the pain, terror, and danger the next four years will hold must have given Joe Biden a moment of genuine hope for his country. He’s old enough to know that a human being, standing alone, doesn’t stand a chance in this world. It was good to see his own future given a chance, in the form of Amanda Gorman. It was good to see him give her a chance. It will be good to see her given many more chances.
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Garth Brooks sang Amazing Grace. His performance was in sharp contrast to the scenes of rioters in the halls of the Capitol. I had the thought that his singing would make for telling irony if done as a voice-over to all the scenes of mayhem videoed on January 6. As a performer, Brooks must have known he would enrage a plurality of his fans by singing a song of reconciliation and love and salvation at Joe Biden’s inauguration. I’ve already seen a hit piece on him saying that his fist-bumps with Democratic officials indicate his willingness to hang out with near-term abortionists and other friends in low places. Death threats cannot be far behind.
Brooks’s performance sparked a good if ancient memory. Julie and I asked her older brother and two younger sisters to sing Amazing Grace at our wedding. For me, at least, it was a presumptuous request. On that day—August 17, 1996—I wasn’t sure a wretch like me could be saved, or that Julie and I, pledging that our union would last until death, would be blessed with the kind of grace that could make that promise last.
The future looked just as dubious then as it does now, and while my sins weren’t as dark as those of John Newton, the reformed slave-ship captain who wrote the hymn, I wasn’t at all sure I deserved forgiveness from God or myself or a series of angry ex-girlfriends. Also, I had colleagues in the English Department who had urged me, upon finding out that I was dating a student, to date someone less innocent, less trusting, less intelligent, and less willing to give her heart than Julie.
I ignored their advice, and Amazing Grace has turned out to be a better selection for our wedding than we could have imagined twenty-five years ago.
We’re going to ask her siblings to sing again at our fiftieth anniversary, if we all get there. I’ll be ninety-five. Making it fifty years together will require a more grace-filled and less dangerous world than we’ve lived in so far.
We’re taking nothing for granted, not grace, not good works, not even our good friend Mr. Dumb Luck. But watching the inauguration last Wednesday, we began to feel that we could at least start planning our future. We put Amanda Gorman on the guest list.
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I have been sleeping eight or nine hours a night since Biden’s inauguration. In the afternoons I’ve been napping on the couch. A great relaxation has come over me, and I’ve realized it’s because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House. I no longer scan the headlines, worried that some fundamental axiom of human decency will have been violated, that some self-aware, competent official will have been fired, or that another woman will reveal assaults physical and legal. I no longer have that small edge of anxiety that awaits each day’s evidence that our government takes satisfaction from being cruel, that it pardons the guilty and executes the insane and takes children from their parents.
I hadn’t realized the weight of the shadow of fear and anger that the Trump Administration cast over the country, and the depth of the ugliness generated by its willingness to punish people of good will. I’ve always believed Solzhenitsyn’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs down the middle of the human heart, but the last four years have demonstrated that the line can be moved so a heart contains far more evil than good.
Trump moved the line for us all. His anger and paranoia have been contagious. His lying has generated terror and rage in hearts where no terror or rage had existed before. His own fears—of losing, of being found out for the hollow human being he is, of discovering that other people are people too, more honest, more decent ones than he is—have found their way into the collective psyche.
Amanda Gorman suggested that we cannot lay down the burden of our history if we don’t study it, know it, understand it, remember every year of it, and tell the truth about it. By extension, if we forget it, ignore it, lie about it, whitewash it—that burden will become heavy enough to break the mind of this nation. It nearly did so on January 6.
But the prohibition against remembering has been lifted. Buried images keep coming to the surface. They’re not pretty, but once we see and acknowledge them, we no longer have to spend our energy making sure we don’t think about them. We can spend that energy moving the line that divides our heart back toward its center.
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It will be a long time before the images of the Capitol riot fade from my mind. It will be a long time before I forget that image of a cop being beaten with a flagpole, or of the retired Air Force officer in combat gear, carrying zip-tie handcuffs for captured congresspeople. I won’t forget the breaking windows or the furniture piled against doors. I won’t forget the profanity, the threats, the feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the broken windows and doors, the murder of a man just doing his job. Fortunately, neither will the FBI.
Rumors are circulating that Capitol rioters were infiltrated by Antifa, and that no Trump supporter would destroy property or disobey a policeman. The video is pretty convincing that they would.
On January 6, our country very nearly lost its vision of itself. I have no doubt that had Trump succeeded in derailing the certification of the Electoral College votes, he would eventually have ended up as the contemporary equivalent of Mussolini, hanging naked upside down from the marquee of a gas station. But millions of people would have died in the interim, most of them through no fault of their own. Trump would have happily sacrificed their lives and their happiness to his own ambitions.
These are strong words, but they’re backed up by recent history. When a country gets as close as ours was to civil war, not much goes according to plan, unless the plan is for a lot of people to die by violence. As a people, we dodged a bullet. A lot of bullets. I’m relieved that what happened here didn’t keep going like it did in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1937, or China in 1949. Let’s hope that the overwhelming majority of Americans are just as relieved as I am.
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Psychopaths will be with us always, and as a country we don’t deal with them as we should. We don’t always lock them up as incurably evil, even when they’ve destroyed lots of people. Often enough, we make them our leaders, and that’s going to get us in terrible trouble one of these days, more terrible than the trouble we’ve already been in.
Here’s a primer on how to recognize them:
They lie when they could just as easily tell the truth.
They’re lazy unless they’re working in their own self-interest. Then they can work really hard.
Their intelligence is cold-blooded, unless they’re stupid. Then their stupidity is cold-blooded.
They remind you that reptiles once ruled the earth.
They never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong.
They never share credit for anything that goes right.
People they have been close to in the past will not go near them.
If you recognize any of these criteria in anyone running for office, it’s a good idea, for the country and for your family and for yourself, not to vote for them. If they’re just running in a mob toward the Capitol, tell them to stop and reconsider whether what they’re intending is reasonable and justified. Watch out for the ones carrying baseball bats.
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Amanda Gorman gave us a compass for right and wrong in her poem, and a moment of grace for a country that needed it. Watch her sing it again—it’s easy enough to call up on YouTube—and you’ll start seeing a country we would vote for if it were on the ballot. I’m glad Joe Biden was listening. I hope we all were.