Dear Mr. President,
You are about my age. I tend to assume that means a person has seen about the same things happen in the world, heard the same songs and had some of the same experiences, but of course this is not true: history is not a window on some deterministic process that creates character or understanding. Like many Americans my relationship with nationality and identity and governance is somewhere between fucked up and complicated. Pretty much every American and half the world engages in some kind of transference around you. But you’re leaving office soon, and I feel kind of bad about things, and I thought I would write you this letter, even if it is just for me.
First, I’d just like to say, that I’m glad I voted for you twice and I’m glad you won. I’m deeply cynical about the mechanisms of huge governments, hegemons and vast militaries, and I don’t know a damn thing about the day to day mechanics of how people accumulate and use power, beyond a middling middle class programmer’s career. You practice an old and terrible art I know nothing of. But even from my lofty perch of despond, your presidency has always felt, at the very worst, like an attempt at harm reduction, with an understanding of harm that I found tangible. Jimmy Carter was the last president I felt that way about, so you know. Even from down here in the uncertain and bankrupt, I can see that your presidency has changed the social contract. We have health insurance now, mostly, which has been very good for me personally. You’ve spoken out about poverty and race and sexuality in a way that no president has before. You’ve handled the most obstructionist congress in my lifetime, and the most blatant kinds of racism at all levels of power, with grace and dignity and in an effective, thoughtful public mode. When I see your picture on Facebook with a nice liberal “Thank you” on it, I mostly will click like. Sometimes I will even smile. I’m not entirely sure that my like is not about thumbing my nose at some racists I went to high school with, which is terrible and not about you at all, but there it is.
Of course, the handling of torture, the endlessly deferred closing of Guantanamo, firing missiles into crowds of civilians from unmanned planes, massive deportations, and all these people in prison and unable to ever get jobs or homes…governments at war, executives winding wars down, and old bureaucracies require a certain moral give and take. I understand. We all understand. It is hard to say more after this. It’s like – well, I’m sure you see the problem. There are 300 million of us now, and it all seems kind of impersonal. Part of me thinks you didn’t have the power to change the terrible things we do, part of me doesn’t care, and part of me thinks that in another 20 years this will have all seemed inevitable and damned and irrelevant, cast as brilliance or lost opportunity or both, a few opening bars of the Anthropocene’s rising minor score. From out here in the stands it felt like you embraced the presidency and wanted the job, including all the spies and generals and pomp and circumstance and leak prosecutions. People who wear suits and are ferried by helicopters don’t have much to do with me. I just assumed you were trying not to steer the country into more tragedy, and as Hunter S. Thompson said, buy the ticket, take the ride. I said these things to myself because in my sad little world of transference, I wanted to keep liking you. Now that you’re nearly an ex-president, I should be more honest. Intelligence, expedience and perceived necessity, even love, don’t change it. A little receding infinitesimal part of me, every time I vote, hopes that someone will be elected president and just say look, I know I’ll be impeached tomorrow, I don’t care, there’s just some terrible cruel stuff we don’t do anymore, it isn’t right. I know this will never happen, some part of me will always want this magic and impossible moment of American Perestrokia. And I’ll want it, just a little, with every expedient word and lean into the wind. You see how transference is…I understand myself better now. I’m guessing here, but I figure you and your team have understood perfectly well that millions of us have felt this way since the day after you were elected, and there was no way to fix it. That little bit of sad has been about me the whole time, and I can’t shake it, even though I’ve known it’s ridiculous just as long as you’ve known how disappointed we all were that the presidency doesn’t work like that. You seem to have kept us from Armageddon, and our hearts were always going to be broken.
It’s funny, but writing down the feeling of even these crazy, one sided relationships can be helpful sometimes. If it were anyone else, I would say I needed some time alone to just sort things out, but it seems like the presidents keep coming, and it is the best I can do to process what I can before the next one. It’s really cheesy to end a letter with a movie reference, but there is a scene in the HBO Angels In America, and Louis and Belize are talking below Bethseda Fountain in a storm. Louis is white and serious and anguished and mushy and Belize is knowing and arch and black, out here in the rain to see his friend who he obviously cares about and is really mad at. If you’ve seen it, I’m sorry, but I just have to tell it. At the end, Belize goes all high drama on Louis, he says “I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.” That’s petty harsh, and true and terrible in a way, and you’re still watching these two men in the rain, Belize about to walk away, and it is a little hard to breathe watching this. Before he turns into the rain — and there is a lot of rain, the way only New York can explode into water and air — he says “I live in America, Louis, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something.” And Louis is alone in the rain now, he’s looking out into the storm, in the shadow of shelter but drenched, and he just says “Everybody does” – and its just the most devastating thing, because you hear it, all of it, you know that Belize is right and Louis is an idiot and his love of his country is as fucked up and inconstant and broken and true as his romantic life. It is a great scene. And to tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. At first it seemed to me like Belize was right on, and I guess it still does, but it also feels like Louis standing in for Tony Kushner, and Belize is speaking the lines Kushner wrote, and every single line of this scene is about love and the failure of love, there is not a pragmatist anywhere in that cold, cold city rain.
I know you are very busy, and I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. It is a public letter, and more important to me than I imagine it could ever be to a president, and I appreciate it. I really must say, I am frightened of our next election. My therapist tells me this is perfectly ordinary, simply part of the process, and when I think back over my life with past presidents, I am pretty sure he is right. After writing this letter, I’m really clear with myself that love goes wrong a lot, even with your country it is like a good Leonard Cohen song, and I can live with that. Trust me when I say that any unrequited love is superior to my personal life, really. But it did seem important to say – I’m pretty sure, now, that is about love. Loving the future, our country, ourselves, even when we know it is stupid and silly and hopeless. Maybe especially then. I think that is what is most frightening, and I really think – though of course I cannot presume to know the thoughts of others (or even, much of the time, my own) – that it might be that bell hooks is right, and she’s not the only one to say it, that from here it might have been about love all along. I know you didn’t mean to lead us on. Guys who talk about hope – well, you know where you are at the start, really. But it seems like there are a lot of people whose anger can only be understood as a kind of broken love, and they are at rallies for men who want terrible things, and that the people who – well, I guess I must say it – went out to vote for you because of a kind of love, might be too sad to vote this time. We’ll say lots of things, sad people do, but really – broken hearts just are, even if you didn’t break them. I understand, I completely understand, that this is ours to handle. It’s just a little scary right now, because we are talking about almost anything besides our broken hearts, which people will tend to do, and even though I know you know it was us, all along…I wish for that moment when we first seemed like it might be OK, almost eight years ago now.
Thanks for reading.
