NASHVILLE — There I was, snug in my own bed in the middle of the night, turning to sleep on my side, when wham! the room slid sideways. Then it took off, spinning and spinning as though a sadistic carnival barker had flipped a switch and pushed the speed to max.
Reader, I will spare you the details except to say that I have lately learned how delicate an instrument is the human ear, how many ways there are to disrupt its functions. As when, say, a lump of wax detaches itself from the ear canal through an exactly wrong combination of angles and gravity, lodges itself in the eardrum, and transforms the human vestibular system into a Tilt-A-Whirl. For days I lay in bed, trying not to move my head and reciting to myself lines from “The Second Coming,” a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
At the otolaryngologist’s office, the source of my torture finally emerged after half an hour of patient manipulations by a doctor wielding tiny power tools. In the newly stationary room, I looked at it, amazed. How fragile the human body is that it can be thrown into chaos by something so small!
The same can be said for the body politic. Right-wing politicians and media outlets have turned American democracy upside down through nothing more than a lie. They put forth Supreme Court candidates who assure Congress that they respect legal precedent but who vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade the instant they have a majority on the court. They endorse political candidates who openly state that they will accept only poll results leading to their own election.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
They denounce calamities where no calamities exist, turning public schools into battlegrounds and library books and bathrooms into weapons. But their “answer” to the real calamity of children being slaughtered in their classrooms is to arm teachers, to bring even more guns into the classroom. Political violence and threats are rising, and so is the intimidation of voters and voting officials.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Here in blue Nashville, the Tennessee General Assembly carved the city into three different voting districts this year, hoping to send yet another Republican to Congress from a state where both senators are Republicans, and the entire congressional delegation, not counting the current representatives from Memphis and Nashville, is Republican.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Representative Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog moderate, opted not to run for re-election, but Heidi Campbell, a state senator, stepped up. Ms. Campbell is a progressive who has significantly outpaced her MAGA opponent in fund-raising, but it would take a miracle turnout in Nashville for her to win in a district expressly drawn to make her lose.
While Republicans are skilled at suppressing votes in districts that don’t favor Republicans, they have proven to be incompetent at administering the vote in these newly redrawn districts, which divide neighborhoods and sprawl out into the surrounding red counties. Last week, Nashville election officials — and keep in mind that the Davidson County Election Commission is regulated by the Republican state government and controlled by a Republican majority — distributed the wrong ballots to at least 200 Nashville voters. The error was caught not by voting officials but by The Associated Press.
This may well be an honest mistake. Nevertheless, when you gerrymander a district out of recognizability with the express purpose of subverting the will of the political majority, and yours is the party screaming nonstop about nonexistent voter fraud, and you send people to the wrong district to vote, too, you deserve to be held accountable.
On Friday, ACLU Tennessee filed a lawsuit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and two voters affected by the error. By Friday night, election officials had agreed to abide by a court order to address the error, though the solutions are complicated and will no doubt leave votes uncounted anyway.
This chaos could’ve been avoided simply by allowing Nashville to continue to vote as a district and by honoring the will of the voters. “This is the result of a racist, bigoted, money-hungry Republican Legislature who is doing everything to hoard power to keep the system rigged against everyday working-class people,” said Odessa Kelly, the Democratic candidate in the redrawn Seventh Congressional District.
Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Americans belong to an electorate in which those who are most affected by voter suppression laws and extreme gerrymandering are so full of despair they may see no point in trying. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, voters aren’t especially concerned about the possibility of losing their own democracy.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.
People often think I’m an optimist because I believe that human beings are mostly good, because I know that reasons for hope are everywhere if you look for them.
The good people of Kansas voted to preserve abortion rights, for instance, and polls indicate that they would be far from alone if other red-state voters were given the chance to choose. The chaos agent formerly known as Kanye West has discovered the cost of antisemitism in the wide world, even if it mostly goes unchallenged in his squalid corner of the political sphere. The chaos agent known as Elon Musk may be on track to kill the hellsite known as Twitter. Best of all, a new report suggests that we haven’t yet lost the chance to prevent this verdant and teeming planet from becoming completely uninhabitable.
Even so, I am not an optimist. I spend much of my life with my heart in my throat, and at this moment I am terrified. What has happened to my country that 20 percent of Americans believe political violence is justified? That an entire political party increasingly relies on lying and cheating to win elections? That Vladimir Putin, of all people, has become a Republican hero?
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“I get why people are anxious,” Barack Obama said last week on the stump for Democrats in Georgia. “I get why you might be worried. I understand why it might be tempting sometimes just to tune out, to watch football or ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ But I’m here to tell you that tuning out is not an option. Despair is not an option.”
Despair is not an option, but vertigo appears to be inescapable.
My mother, too, was prone to both debilitating vertigo and frequent dizzy spells. At Mass one Sunday, in line for communion, she stepped up to the priest and started to tilt. Before she even had time to stumble, I put my hands on her shoulders and gently righted her. The priest looked over her head and met my eyes in understanding. Elder care is hard, he seemed to be saying, but this is what we do for one another. Somebody begins to fall. Somebody else catches the falling one.
If only it were so in other realms. If only we could be counted on to catch one another before we fell. If only American voters will stand up for democracy and vote to restore the equilibrium of our fragile body politic. That would be the true answered prayer.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
