Harper’s Notes (11/25/24)

Tilting at windmills: In her essay for The Harper Review, Hannah Kwak argues that the American descent into conspiratorial thinking comes with a silver lining. As conspiracy theories attribute tragedy to the dark deeds of powerful individuals, they insist upon the maintenance of a reassuring, even optimistic, narrative: evil is ultimately “traceable to an agent” and remains “because it has not yet been exposed.” While, to be sure, conspiracy theories carry potential for harm, Kwak finds something almost romantic in the search for secret plots—“as if we have to go looking for evil, as if its presence is not already ubiquitous.” Unfortunately, Kwak writes, reality is far less quixotic. More often than not, negligence, not evil, is the cause of our woes, and one need only think of the horrors of sweatshops or the abuses of factory farms to remember that the true harms of “the wealthy elite” aren’t secret. Conspiracy theorists, unlike the rest of us, haven’t given up on a world with human responsibility. The task is now for everyone else to remember this too—and to direct it at something better than windmills.

A life of the mind: For his crime of “gnostical turpitude,” Cincinnatus C., a dangerous nonconformist living in a nameless dystopia and the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, is imprisoned and sentenced to death by decapitation. Ignorant of the exact date of his execution, Cincinnatus begins to write, giving voice to his deepest fears and bemoaning the vulgarity and superficiality of the people around him. To make things worse, he is plagued by a series of unwelcome visitors, from his unfaithful wife to the executioner himself. Each guest in turn rebukes him for his tactlessness and ingratitude, reserving their strongest criticism for his behavior towards the prison director. They wonder: how can a man in Cincinnatus’s comfortable position resent the ministrations and generosity of his captors?
In describing Cincinnatus’s plight, Nabokov articulates the struggles of free-thinking people everywhere. How can a person stay true to his ideals in a world obsessed with frivolities and sensuous pleasures? How can a person preserve his individuality in the face of relentless pressure to conform? Informed by Nabokov’s experience as a refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution, Invitation to a Beheading is a work of surrealist fiction on par with the novels of Kafka. More than that, however, it is a paean to the contemplative life and to our greatest bulwark against the blandishments of authoritarianism—that is, the liberating power of independent thought.

Pipe dreams: “Dream” is a controversial buzzword in the American lexicon. We use the “American dream” to describe white picket fences and Coca-Cola, or more elusive concepts like “opportunity” and “equality.” Every day, the phrase becomes more and more ironic—American reality is perpetually paying rent, living through school shootings, and consuming high fructose corn syrup. Paul Simon and Edie Brickell’s new duet, “Bad Dreams,” wrestles with the aspirations and realities of the American dream at a moment of profound political identity crisis for the nation. Over the course of the moody, melancholic tune, they ask three questions:

The first question is nostalgic for simpler times. “Yesterday’s secret” represents peaceful oblivion, an idealized past that Simon and Brickell see as ever more impossible to recapture. The second question speaks to an escapist desire that is alive and well in the US at present, where more and more citizens dream of running away to foreign places (while still, of course, retaining their remote job to earn American bucks). The last question is the most cynical, reckoning with the reality that the “promise” of America is not panning out. Who knows if it ever even existed?