"No Pleasure But Meanness" (Postcards from America)

All images taken in the quaint, well-to-do town of Farmville, VA, 18 April 2025

By this time, evidence that the United States has become a country for which it can be hazardous for international tourists merely to visit has become widespread enough to significantly affect the country's tourism revenue. And I'm sorry to personally attest that the reasons one now hears to avoid the US are real.

 

I've found it telling that one of the common ways Americans now conclude a conversation or email is with the phrase "Be safe." Never in my life here have I heard this used as it has been the last couple of years here, and I always find it hard not to ask why anyone would be assuming the kind of danger that would necessitate such a wish. We are not in Gaza or the West Bank, not in Kiev, not even in the neighborhoods in which the Republican regime's ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) now kidnap people off the street, out of workplaces and schools and churches (a lawless policy of what used to be known in Latin America as "disappearing" that the cowardly and complicit US press now obediently euphemises as "deporting"). In reply to these words I always want to ask, especially of those who see no criminality in the current regime's actions, "What threat do you now imagine to be omnipresent?"

 

But Americans are frightened now, and seem to have become addicted to being frightened, as it is the engine that drives politics, economics, and social media. President Franklin D Roosevelt's famous admonition that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," has been perverted into something like "There's only one thing from which we can constantly profit, and that is fear itself."

 

Of course there are concrete reasons to be fearful of the damage that the current regime and Republican Party are determined to inflict upon this country and its people (and the world)--though indignation and disgust and a commitment to the rule of law would better motivate the proper responses to them, I suspect.  

"Paranoia," Adam Phillips writes, "is a self cure for insignificance. The modern paranoiac invites persecution out of fear of invisibility. Te be hated makes him feel real: he has made his presence felt. To be unforgivable is to be unforgettable. As an object of hatred one is exceptionally vivid to other people." Being hated, believing oneself to be a target of envy, for example, or of vast conspiracies, is proof that one actually exists--even as the society in which you actually live disenfranchises you in countless ways.

 

 I've never been very fond of the writer Flannery O'Connor, but I've been reading her lately for her attention to what she terms "all the violence and grotesquery and religious enthusiasm" that in her day (the '50s and '60s) could still reassuringly (and falsely) be localized in the American South. All the violence and grotesquery and religious lunacy is now blatantly a national matter, and O'Connor--not least of all because of what I consider her own religious excesses (she proudly described her writing as being "watered and fed by [Catholic] dogma" and likely would've detested the recently-deceased Pope Francis)--seems to give voice to some of its roots. 

It is from O'Connor, from the mouth of a mass murderer character in her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," that the title of this post comes. It's one way of summarizing the feel of American society these days, and of the great challenge of what must be overcome.

 

It must be noted here that, contrary to the assertion of the circular sign in the window above, there is absolutely no evidence that the prevalence of guns in the US does anything other than kill more people than would otherwise die.