There were certainly elements of my childhood that were less than idyllic. My parents divorced when I was small, and there were confusing, turbulent years during which I spent summers and holidays with my father, the remainder of time with my mother. During these years, a core memory is of flying through the vast desert between California and New Mexico, staring out the window and wondering what place I might call home.
Nevertheless, there were elements of my childhood that were almost stereotypically American. My father worked at Disney, and an equally prominent core memory is of entering Disney World through staff-only entrances, cutting lines, and riding whichever ride I pleased as many times as I liked. Ditto the Disney cruises we took as a family, or the celebrities I was able to meet as a child, among them magicians Penn and Teller, actress Jane Fonda, actor Edward Norton. If the United States is chiefly a producer of entertainment, then in the nineties and early two-thousands I was raised at its epicenter.
In high school, I developed the notion that ours was a magical country and worth fighting for. The Bush years filled me and my parents with dread, but there were also comedians retaliating in creative ways–The Onion, Daily Show, and Borat come to mind–and with Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, I had the sense that any historical injustice could be overcome, the nation learning through its foibles. Although the 2008 crash surrounded my exodus to university with an ominous air, as a privileged kid I was relatively insulated from the effects, and I both entered and exited university with this same feeling of promise.
2016 hit me and my peers like a sack of bricks. I vividly remember returning home from work that evening, turning on the election results, and texting my roommates a picture of the tequila I would soon be imbibing. How could America have done something so monumentally stupid, so racist? Taking off from work the next day, my roommates and I sat around the house and cried.
And yet there was galvanization in my despair, this same through-line of hope in the dark. From 2017 on through the remainder of Trump’s first term, I researched and wrote both essays and fiction about the onslaught of fascism, attended every protest I could, fashioned grassroots community as the antidote to an alien culture. These were also the years during which I discovered and built an identity as a spiritual person, and I thoroughly felt that if America had strayed from its once noble ideals, those ideals would be restored; in fact, I portrayed the entire Trump regime as a sort of cleansing process for the nation’s ills.
I no longer feel that way. Trump’s second election has felt to me like not an aberration, but rather a forceful reminder of what this nation represents, has always represented. Where my youth and early adulthood filled me with idealism, I have found myself floundering in the waters of cynicism, perceiving America as a joke whose punchline has belatedly arrived–and nobody is laughing. What might the Native Americans say about the lofty perception I once held regarding this country? What about African Americans, trapped in a non-native land, forced to work without pay, denied reparations for their losses? In this new schema, I have come to most greatly appreciate art which lays bare the American experiment by means of satire, even scorn; Ari Aster’s Eddington comes to mind, as do the stories of George Saunders.
As an adult in this bankrupt union, I am in some sense still resting in that airplane seat, still wondering what place I might call home. Although I longed to do so then, I have since given up on reconciling my metaphorical “parents,” bringing together the Democrats and Republicans in a manner akin to the film The Parent Trap; for a number of years, I imagined I might do this through writing. At this point, I am searching for deeper realms of home than the mere and literal home-land, striving for community and spirituality which contextualize the US as a blip in the scheme of time.
Eventually I will take refuge in my solitary life, accepting that I cannot heal the collective. I will tell myself that I am just one person among many, that I did not control the accidents of my birth, and I will remind myself that in every moment I have been conscious, I have tried to do what was right, to be one of the helpers on this planet. It will all be true, and in those sentiments a new semblage of “home” will form.
And yet there will be a mourning, too: I will remember that at one time America was a country I loved, and of which I sang.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 