I live at the end of one of the most famous boulevards in the world. I’ve been here six months. If you told me six years ago I’d be here, I’d have been astonished, but as we all know, it’s been that kind of six years. It was six years ago this summer that a Manhattan faux-billionaire & “reality” TV star began his successful campaign to become the 45^th President of the United States.

Anyone who comes to L.A. walks up & down this stretch of road reading stars engraved in the sidewalk. I’ve walked this boulevard many times never supposing someday it would be my address. When I was four, my Mom & Dad brought me to the theater across the street, designed in its world-famous Chinese style, to see Lady and the Tramp, and even had I been old enough to ponder such things, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that someday the empty window across the street would be mine. Ignorantly all of us cross, tens or hundreds of times, life’s significant coordinates. All of us blithely pass places where later our lives take irrevocable turns, where later we create or destroy something of those lives. Any number of times we may stumble thru that place where we’ll die. I’m old enough now that it’s not out of the question this is the last place I’ll live.

America wearies of democracy was the opening line of something I wrote once. It was eight months ago today that the country’s worst attempted coup since 1861 took place, when the national Capitol was pillaged by thousands of domestic terrorists & white supremacists & anti-Semites in “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts, killing six people & wounding scores of others. In Congress, one of the two major political parties means to cover up the details of this rampage so as to protect members complicit in treason & so as to revise a reality that was broadcast to the world & witnessed by billions. Since spring, virtually every state in the Union endeavors to deliver to a bankrupt Republican Party control of the counting of votes that it may then choose to reject.

This is done in the name of no principle but power, in the name of no hope but the rest of us forgetting. It succeeds because an exhausted people allow it to; authoritarianism abides not by instigation but inertia. More than any time in our lives, men & women of bad faith & bad conscience who have been betrayed by math too often — losing seven of eight national elections in three decades — seize the only recourse left to them which is to betray math back. Due process is slandered. Objective truth is subverted. Like a gasping man beneath the knee of a Minneapolis cop, democracy chokes beneath the knee of a peculiarly American fascism.

If it’s true that, more than any other country in history, America has succeeded as a grand overarching idea rather than a mass of traditions, then it may be inevitable that America always has been in a state of civil war. It may be inevitable that its overarching idea could never reconcile what were profoundly competing visions from the outset having to do with race & class, freedom & justice. In any case, now the American Idea is cleaved more painfully than any of us has known. Let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that the last four years were about our previous President. The last four years were about us. Donald Trump didn’t happen to America. America happened to America.

I began this journal two years ago at the intersection of manifesto & confession. Notwithstanding fearful New York publishers advising that “its ferocity stands in the way of attracting readers,” I figured I might as well tell this as anyone. Other testaments bring you facts. I come bearing the W-W-Word, stuttered but not broken.

The Secret Life of Peter Beard, Part Two

Susan Zakin