They discuss it while a small TV overlooking the bar plays a live feed of a youngish Barack Obama delivering his election victory speech. When he gets to the part about America being one country, one community—out of many, one—Pitt’s character scoffs, “It’s a myth created by Thomas Jefferson . . . a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits.” Pitt’s hard-bitten cynicism caps the film. “Don’t make me laugh,” he says. “I’m living in America, and, in America, you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”
He had never given much thought to what America was about. It was above his pay grade. Once, it had been about the old versus the young, about supporting the war in Vietnam or opposing it, but, with the televised killing of George Floyd, America had become a misfire, a moral mare’s nest. We’d found the secret portrait recording our sins: slavery, Jim Crow, our treatment of Chinese workers, Native Americans, unions, women. But it was still America, right? Give me liberty or give me death. Four score and seven years ago. Ask not what your country can do for you. “When the values go up up up / And the prices go down down down / Robert Hall this season / Will show you the reason / Low overheads.” Compared to murdering fucking Nazis and crazed, robotic Japanese soldiers, we were goddam saints. Anyway, what was he supposed to do about it? His skin puckered on the inside of his elbows, hair grew in his ears, dark spots mottled the backs of his hands—what do you call them? Liver spots, sun spots, age spots? Too many to know which were recent and which had been around a while. He should have taken pictures of them and dated each photo, so he could track their number and location, a chronological map that led to oblivion. In the meantime, noise. People wanting to wrap the country in a shroud and bury it—tearing down statues, renaming buildings and holidays, cancelling this person and that one, stopping the publication of a book because its author was accused of rape. Where was Kate Smith when you needed her? And what happens? Thousands of malevolent idiots storm the Capitol because a reckless lowlife narcissist pays them a little attention, making them feel they’re still protagonists in the nation’s history. Is this what America is about? A reign of error countered by a reign of terror? And everything playing out against a plague killing millions around the world. What did it all amount to? Maybe just numbers. Generations come and generations go, but space and dark matter abideth forever.
from What's the Deal, Hummingbird? by Arthur Krystal
The New Yorker, January 24, 2022
photo from Killing Them Softly
