L'Enfant Terrible

Most people who claim cynicism for themselves are usually, on some level, total posers. By its definition, the act of saying it out loud, "I am a cynic," is a declaration of a posture for the benefit of the listening public. This is a positive act of self-definition, a blatant affirmation meant to provide clarity for those around you when such an announcement might seem appropriate, say at Thanksgiving or waiting in line to vote or shouted at strangers in a bus station. Just saying it in such a way almost disqualifies the speaker from cynicism as a position.

Real cynics, the standard bearers, wear their wriggling, flesh-eating despair deep in the voiceless core of their being, learning to enjoy (after a fashion) the soft rubbing throb in their chest as it gnaws away at whatever gristly bits are left of their hope, joy, honesty, charity, openness and ability to function as a productive and interactive member of a human society. This is what I call the Sean Hannity Effect.

True cynicism, like the Buddhist level of true enlightenment, is rarely achieved, however. We're all carriers of it in small doses. It's as endemic among humans as influenza. In the same way, it also flares up every once in a while and kills several million Spaniards.

The trick is to recognize it before it gets you, before the other causative factors drive it out of whatever state of remission you'd tricked it into and it ravages you to death, or worse to run for office. This is an especially dangerous time for those of us susceptible. How many Diebold voting machines, Bush v. Gores, NSA leaks or smoking gun/mushroom cloud metaphors can one citizen be expected to withstand before all the feeling-est parts on the skin at the extremities get sanded off entirely?

The answer, at least for me, is to try to plug into something outside of yourself, to remind yourself of the grand scope of where it is you come from, the true breadth and depth of American decency; the shocking, reckless audacity by which this country as an idea was formed and the infernal, internal complexity it continues to function under, belying the Us/Them narrative anti-dialogue presented by mass media.

When I was traveling this week, I did so many thousand miles away from socked-in liberal utopia out here on the Left Coast and found something of the old unapologetic, bright-orange-cheeseball American can-do in Washington, D.C.

I get that it seems odd that to fight personal cynicism, one should make a pilgrimage to the grubbiest cesspool in which swim such vile specimens as NRA lobbyists, professional racists and Mitch McConnell. Remember your biology, though: in order to fight smallpox, they had to give you smallpox.  I saw it in the John Adams miniseries. It was totally gross, so it must be historically true.

Go ahead. You hold on to your doubts and wobbling faith standing before the grand, stabbing, upward thrust of the Washington Monument, prying apart and forcing itself inside the close, moist sky of the Greater Chesapeake lowlands.

Try to deny the living, ripe fecundity of the 18th century democratic ideal as you gaze upon the majestic inverted scrotum that is the Capitol Dome.

I defy you to walk among all that carved, stacked, milky white marble and not walk out of there sporting an enormous, untameable America-boner.

What struck me the most, I think, wasn't any of the grander stuff per se, but on our last day, we made an impromptu visit to Mount Vernon, just south of D.C. I stood there before the tomb containing the mortal remains of George Washington, just a few short, legally-protected inches from my grasp, and the fragility and the finitude of all of it, what the grandiose and quadrennial electoral conventioneers like to call "the American Experiment," snapped into bright, contoured focus. Actions matter. Individuals matter. Maybe not in themselves, but choices are pulled from and then either reinforce or subtly deflect the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, as they are reinserted. In those few moments, where was the space for apathy or greed, lassitude or paralysis, machination or deceit?

On the way out we passed the slave quarters and ah! There it was again.