Anthem

by Noah Hawley

Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

And yet something about the community he grew up in felt aggrieved and self-pitying, this constant lamenting about how the man was keeping a brother down. Remy wanted his street to be safer, his classmates to be more respectful. Opportunity, wealth, prestige, these were his ideals. He rejected the burden of history he was told he had to shoulder, replacing it with the mythos of personal achievement. Today Remy believes that his success is a product of individual effort. He made good choices. He worked hard. Everything else is just an excuse.

Everybody has a theory, Judge Nadir has come to believe. A conviction, dogged and tenacious, which they refuse to surrender. This is the American way. We have home remedies we swear by, superstitions we will not renounce. We are optimists or pessimists, trusting or suspicious. We confirm our theories online. The internet, invented to “democratize information,” has turned out, instead, to be a tool of self-affirmation. Whether you believe you’re suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or that 9/11 was an inside job, the World Wide Web exists to tell you you’re right.

He smiles back, feeling both restless and content. Content because the idea of America when absorbed through imagery or idealistic song brings an almost overwhelming sense of identity, of belonging. A swell of national wonder. And restless because feelings are not facts, and the desire to belong, to be something, doesn’t make that dream come true.

This is who we had become by then, people who gathered in the rain, arguing over whether or not they were getting wet.

And what is adolescence if not a great height from which we are all expected to jump? A precipice of hormones and doubt, of alienation and longing. No longer a child. Not yet grown. Trapped in the pain of becoming.

This was who we had become, a nation of symbolic acts, where what “we” believed and what “they” believed were not just contrary, but opposite. Up is down; black is white. This final fracture of reality had given birth to an existential riddle: What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized? Had this impossible struggle driven them mad?

Liberals pointed to elevated environmental toxins, to algae blooms in the Atlantic, to leaching plastics, even as the talking heads of right-wing media denied that suicide was a problem. They saw it as a false flag operation—even as their own children began to eat the gun, in a loop of cause and effect that would seem ironic if it weren’t so tragic.

“Those frightened people were our parents,” he tells Simon. “And rather than raising us, their children, from a place of love, they raised us in fear. Doesn’t it stand to reason that their fear would shape the adults we become? Anxious, plagued by a constant sense that something, everything, is wrong. Their fear has crippled us, and our inability to function only feeds our anxiety. We are failing at life. So now all we are is failure.”

Perceived loss of standing had torn our country apart. The fear of losing ground to those beneath us. As proof, experts pointed to the drained public pools of the 1950s, where white suburbanites had physically drained and paved over their beautiful, newly built public pools rather than share them with Black families. Rather than elevate those they perceived as lower status to their own level. Deep down, it seemed, many Americans were convinced that a gain for others was a loss for themselves.

We are all victims of our brains. They tell us to do things and we do them. They tell us to believe things and we believe them. They hide our blind spots from us. All the while we believe we are making choices. This is the best trick our brains play on us. They tell us we are rational, decision-making machines, when really we are obeying machines, hardwired by DNA.

You really think clear-minded, non-traumatized people elected the God King? You think healthy, well-rounded, non-traumatized people made up QAnon or Pizzagate? Pedophile this and Democratic sex dungeon that. These people have been fucked over so much they’re trapped in a mindset.”

There are many great works of satire in modern literature. Your author has enjoyed several over the years. Cutting works of wit and derision that once had the power to shame. But, in the Age of Inverted Reality, shame has transformed itself into pride, ridicule hijacked by the ridiculous and used to mock other human beings for their empathy and caring. To call someone a bully is no longer an insult. What crimes were once perpetrated in shadow are now committed in the open. What can this mean, if not that criminality is no longer a crime?

In the beginning there was denial. And then, thanks to Sigmund Freud and big tobacco and all-politics-is-personal, came denialism. The organized rejection of reality in favor of fantasy. That all-consuming industry of denying science, denying experts, denying truth itself. The world is flat. The holocaust never happened. 911 was an inside job. Vaccines cause autism. COVID-19 is a hoax. The election was stolen. We don’t want to die, so we pretend we won’t. And when you get right down to it, if we can deny our own deaths, we can deny anything.

She met Felix last year at a bar. He was a skinny, mop-haired boy up from San Marcos with haunted eyes.

Once upon a time, she stood on a stage and sang the national anthem, but where is her anthem now? That human anthem, nationless and true, with all its sorrow and yearning, all its hope and grief. The music of existence.

“I figured it out,” he repeats. “It’s grief. The five stages of death, right? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but we’re all trapped in the first two stages. The whole country, or maybe the Earth. We’re in denial and we’re pissed, because something we love is dead, except, for half the country, what they’re grieving is the past they think they’ve lost, and the other half is mourning the progress they thought they’d made, but everyone feels the same way. Like someone they love is dead.

Stop asking so many questions, I told her. But of course that’s her job. She’s thirteen, and I’m handing her the keys to a car called Earth. What’s this dent? she’s asking. Why is this broken? Is it safe?