Editor’s Note: Marlow confided to us at Socotra House that he has been ‘diddling’ (publisher’s technical term for fine-tuning subtle rhetoric and smoothing flourishes) with this piece for some time. Given the bemusing state of affairs abroad and here at home, we were interested in his take on things delivered from his perch above the waves that caress the brilliantly lit shores of his Coastal Empire.

– Vic
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America at the polls poles (anti)podes

As we saw late last summer, we should have known better than to read the online Ukrainian war news headlines during the past two months.

Biden Declares
Firmness on War;
Plans are Unclear

It’s so classically post-Cold War American. Unclear firmness! It’s become America’s foreign policy of choice: don’t be clear, but be firm. In America “foreign policy” is a euphemism for public relations, and our public relations gets worse and worse. We don’t want to admit to being defeated. Plus, we’re terribly bad at being good losers.

America (at least to me) — not quite young anymore, but not old either; a little breathless, quite beautiful, maybe sometimes a little stupid, maybe not as often as expected smarter than it seems. Always looking for something around the corner it thinks will be good. Look at our recent leaders — initially seemed to be good (or at least a change of pace), desirable, even funny — so we’re vulnerable to them — never quite happy, always a little overweight just like the country.

Now I am tempted to rail on and call them vermin, scum, slime, unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity, but I’m in a charitable mood today; so, let’s agree that, fortunately, most of them are minor characters, yet still distasteful vaux-reins.

Shoulda known better . . . our eventual disapproval should be noted as legitimate, even welcomed. But we were not welcomed to be ignorant, to have looked the other way at their inability to perform when they inevitably changed their minds too slow to matter as things spiraled down and out.

Our willingness to accept this endless over-promise-under-deliver process (mostly I guessed on this since I couldn’t be sure) leads me to see America much like the small neighborhoods of our youth — places where we grew up with the peculiar, living next to the strange, for so long that every odd thing and every bizarre person became commonplace. Unremarkable really.

Jesus, why did we always feel a refreshingly new sense of security, when they were voted inchosen, like a moment of laughter with teenaged friends in the enclosed back seat’s moonless night darkness of a fast-moving car and the accompanying sense of freedom the car’s movement gave to us? This seemingly effortless journeying always is a sad wonder to me to me this idea of motion, not to mention its sense of change, since it was accomplished very rarely and only with enormous and costly strife and loss.

We are a tribe of teenagers, self-deceivers one and all, believing we can trick the world. We just know we are invulnerable. Adolescents who are perpetually in danger of never growing up. Our unplanned comedic affect is ingrained. We don’t knowingly choose to be silly. We could plot a different path, even not to have one by abstaining from voting. We could accept or reject the more outrageous characters we vote for. But the ensuing dark comedy is not a choice — it’s just destined to come out that way. A feature not a bug.

This prolonged American adolescence leads me to ask why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime for us to go beyond being a lousy teenager? Why does this American phase of childhood take forever? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of our whole trip? And when it’s over, when we kids grow up, when you suddenly face facts that our friends are passing and time is short . . . that the rest of our lives moves past us twice as fast. Saying smugly “that’s just how it is” is enraging, because before we know it, we’re thinking about being fifteen in aeternum. JHFC!

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