Finding Hope in Troubled Times? A Middle-Aged American's Retrospective, Part I

Hello, my fellow bugbears! I hope you are all as well as can be under the circumstances. It's probably pretty clear that I have been not especially well this winter. My productivity has stalled as I've been stunned, though not surprised, at the many abuses of the Trump regime and the revelations from the Epstein files. I have felt spent, out of ideas, useless, powerless. I imagine that many of us have been feeling the same way.

In some ways, it feels like just another iteration of having the social contract I thought applied to me ripped up in front of me, which has been a fairly regular occurrence of my adult life as an exvangelical idealist who has had to shed layers upon layers of naïveté to learn that the faith and politics I grew up with were authoritarian and harmful, to shed black and white thinking, and to learn to live in the gray without embracing cynicism.

It gets harder with each new piece of information on how thoroughly corrupted our elite institutions and social structures are, and I can't help but wonder if this moment of consciousness of that corruption, which has come in light of the Epstein files, will become another flash in the pan like "me too," with few ultimate consequences for perpetrators and even fewer serious reforms. I am also nauseated by the torture so many innocent people are undergoing in American concentration camps, and I am afraid we will not hold the perpetrators--from Trump and Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller on down to the camp guards--accountable in any meaningful way. I hope that we do. I will demand that we do, when we somehow get through this. But I fear that there will be no accountability. I fear the same regarding the current Israeli regime's ongoing genocide in Gaza, around which there is so much enforced silence in the elite public sphere.

I have always been prone to pessimism. I don't consider pessimism a moral failure or incompatible with hope and belief that a better world, a better future, is possible. But lately, my pessimism and depression have coalesced into a debilitating sense of being stuck, despite the inspiring examples of so many Americans in Minnesota and elsewhere standing up for their neighbors and communities against fascist thugs.

In order to continue writing things that hopefully have value and meaning and represent some kind of small contribution to bettering our world, I am going to have to find my way back to hope. I'm not about to sell my soul to become a basic influencer or a liar for hire. I have financial worries, but my ethical compass simply won't let me embrace cynicism in that sense. But I must get unstuck or self-destruction borne of despair will ensue.

Perhaps this is a midlife crisis. And perhaps it seems indulgent, even narcissistic, to write about it in a time of broader crisis when, even if I am trans, my whiteness protects me from much of what's happening, at least for now.

That being said, I think the only way forward for me is to try to write through this, using the skills I have. I am good at history and introspection, which makes me good at autoethnography. And so, for perhaps the next several editions of The Bugbear Dispatch, I invite you to come along with me as I fumble toward hope through reflecting on the historical tendencies and trajectories that have led to the American present and my own experiences through this swath of history. Maybe something of value will emerge in this self-reflection through the lens of recent history. In any case, I invite subscribers to comment and would be glad to engage in discussion.

I do not promise a strictly linear approach in subsequent installments, but for this one, anyway, let's start about twenty years ago.

During the 2003-2004 academic year, I taught English at the American Home in Vladimir, Russia. It was a more optimistic time for Americans in key respects, although in retrospect it's easy to find foreshadowings of the horrors to come.

Take a moment to historicize the spring and summer of 2003 with me. I had just graduated from Ball State University, a budding liberal still deconstructing the evangelical indoctrination of my youth, but having made good strides toward coming into my own politically and personally.

Here are some salient facts about that moment. The first revelations regarding torture at Abu Ghraib were released in June of that year, but George W. Bush's reelection hadn't happened yet. Hurricane Katrina was more than two years into the future. And the Iraq War had been declared over just a couple of months after it began. Surprise, it wasn't over. But it was possible enough in that moment to believe it was over that even NPR reported the end of the war as fact.

According to the same NPR report linked above, 53% of registered American voters believed the country was headed in the right direction. President Bush's approval rating was well over 60% in May 2003 and would stay above 50% for another year.

Compare that to the present, when Dictator Donald has a 39% approval rating and 38% of American adults say his policies are moving the country in the right direction. To be sure, these statistics aren't directly comparable in an airtight scientific sense, as the methodologies from which they derived differed. Still, I think they're good enough approximations for us to be confident that toward the end of George W. Bush's first term, Americans were generally more optimistic about the country than they are in the middle of Trump's non-consecutive second term.

These snapshots don't tell the whole story of the time. While the United States had entered a sustained state of anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 that would morph into the raging xenophobia and anti-immigrant human rights abuses of the present Trump regime, the end of the Cold War with the now-defunct Soviet Union was also very much a part of living memory.

During my last academic year at BSU, I was assigned an excerpt from Francis Fukyama's 1992 The End of History and the Last Man in the historiography class I needed for the pre-grad-school track. I took the class as an independent study with the late Tony Edmonds, one of the best people and professors I've ever known and one of my mentors at Ball State. He thought the idea of an end of history was silly, as did I, but that was rather theoretical at the time, when many saw liberal democracy and "free" markets as inevitable. Despite the creeping macroeconomic changes driving increasing American inequality–the results of which we would feel more sharply after the 2008 financial crisis–it didn't feel like we were living through history in a disturbing and uncomfortable way, the way it does now.

Meanwhile, the Eurozone was spreading, more countries were adopting the Euro, and it seemed like the future could be one of more open borders and international cooperation. Brexit was well nigh unimaginable, although it shouldn't have been. I remember being in England in early 2002 and seeing reactionary posters with slogans like "Keep the Pound--and save Britain!"

Fukuyama, of course, wasn't completely prescriptive and predictive in his massive tome. Like social sciences founding father Max Weber before him, he warned us that the seemingly smooth future ahead could be derailed. Existential boredom could fuel ideological challenges, and of course there's that invocation of Friedrich Nietzsche's "last man."

Fear of becoming "last men" with nothing but meaningless consumerism to define our lives could fuel nostalgia, which, as I've written before, is a fundamentally conservative emotional state. In fact it's closely related to reactionary revanchism and pernicious concepts like "national greatness." I do not believe that individual nostalgia is inherently evil; it is as "all too human," so to speak, as any other powerful emotional state. That being said, we are responsible for what we do with it, how we act on it, how we manage our feelings and longings.

When I got to Russia to teach, a freshly minted university graduate who hoped for a brighter democratic future for that country and positive U.S.-Russian relations, I would encounter a lot of nationalist sentiment and nostalgia for the Soviet past, something I wouldn't know what to make of for a long time. I also encountered a degree of cynicism that surprised and shocked me, and helped me to shed I suppose helped me to shed one of those layers of naïveté I mentioned above. The next installment in this series will focus on my experiences in post-Cold War Russia in more optimistic times, and what meaning we can perhaps derive from those experiences now.

Stay tuned, and stay safe out there! More soon.

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.