Destiny and Democracy

10-06-2014

(Featured Image: Norman Rockewell's "Portrait of America," Source - Brenna Eaton)

“Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”

– E. B. White

Before becoming the author of a few famously heart-warming children’s novels, E. B. White was the author of one of the most chilling pages of non-fiction in the English language. Written on Aug. 27, 1939, it describes an entire nation’s “long vigil at the radio”, a world twitching “nervously from the likelihood of war at 86 on the dial to the possibility of peace at 100”. In the face of a monstrosity that everyone knew was coming but had not yet begun, time had been suspended, the world having shrunk to the size of a radio “box [everyone] live[d] in”. “Hour after hour”, White writes, “we experience the debilitating sensation of knowing everything in the world except what we want to know – as a child who listens endlessly to an adult conversation but cannot get the gist, the one word or phrase that would make all clear.” It was published on Sept. 2--the day after the German invasion of Poland began.

[caption id="attachment_14538" align="alignleft" width="300"] E. B. White (Source: American Society of Authors and Writers)[/caption]

Four years later (July 3, 1943), with the world then thoroughly transformed, White sent to The New Yorker another short note. It was a response to a request from The Writers’ War Board for a piece on “The Meaning of Democracy”. It is only a paragraph long, a string of one metaphor after another, but the tone is resolute, the prose made driving and rhythmic by White’s beginning every sentence with “Democracy is…”. Democracy, White says, is “the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles”; “the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere”; “the mustard on the hot dog”. “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”

White’s pre-war letter and his epistle for democracy share a focus on the way in which the political world is woven into the everyday sensory fabric of the life of a citizen. In the latter case, this is the triumph of democracy, that it brings “the dent in the high hat” to each act of greeting and writing and savoring. For all that, White finds some excellent metaphors, but it all rings hollow until the last sentence: “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” Like so many good pieces of writing that are turned into great ones at the last moment, only the last sentence carries a hint of ambivalence. It is also the only sentence that mentions the war.

[caption id="attachment_14541" align="aligncenter" width="550"] People sit by the radio for news of war (Source: UVC-WWII)[/caption]

The striking thing about reading these two pieces side-by-side (and I highly recommend it, either in The New Yorker’s archives or in the e-book of their collection “The ‘40s”) is the extraordinary difference in their moral tenor. In his wartime piece, White speaks with an absolute normative conviction. For the E.B. White facing the breaking of the storm, that suspension of time comes with a kind of suspension of moral judgment, waiting for the hour to come: we’re still waiting for the one word or phrase that would make it all clear. Setting those two voices together – one clarion, one surreal and terrifying and ambiguous – also brings out what is so chilling about White’s description of suspended time: it is not how perfectly it captures the moment but how much that moment resonates with our present. Resonates, too, so much more than his later missive for democracy. It is a kind of trick, to end that long flurry of glorifying metaphors with a statement that is also a question, but today, that question also feels more real than the stern realism of its surrounding piece.

What is democracy? There is never a shortage of people asking or answering that question, attaching “democracy” to movements and innovations and spaces, decrying its absence or destruction in others. Underlying that constant invocation, though, is a sense each of us has of what kind of time it is. It is this latter sense, our sense of the time, that may be more important to how the troubles of the political world enter our everyday lives than to any particular diagnoses we have of democracy’s health (and our own). When thinking about what is going on in our present, many people, I suspect, feel occasional moments of that clarity of White’s wartime editorial. The parts of our culture that feed on the affects of righteousness depend on it, or it least something very much like it. But I suspect many of us also feel as my students overwhelmingly felt on reading these pieces: “the debilitating sensation of knowing everything in the world except what we want to know.”

[caption id="attachment_14543" align="aligncenter" width="550"] An Afghan youth shouts at an anti-U.S. protest in Kabul on Sept. 16, 2012, when students poured into the streets of Kabul to protest a film mocking Islam that has also sparked deadly riots in the Middle East and North Africa. (Source: Asia Society)[/caption]

The BBC Online carried a condescending headline this week “What Americans Do and Don’t Know About the World” (it has now been archived under the still less subtle “Five Questions Most Americans Can’t Answer”). While some might find the results of the Pew study on said Americans disturbing, the essential premise of the article spectacularly misses the heart of the political moment.

The question that lurks behind the feeling of anxious paralysis that White taps into is not whether we know enough, that we could be acting more competently if only we had a bit better grasp of some facts. There are plenty of us who know plenty about virtually every evident political problem: and yet with ISiS, with the Ebola outbreak, with so many of those problems, there nevertheless remains a fear that we do not know the thing that is and will be what makes the difference to history.

The time of politics in our everyday lives is not the time of E.B. White’s 1943, but his 1939. “We have been tuned in, off and on, for forty-either hours, trying to snare intimations of our destiny, as in a butterfly net.” There is a sense of missing a kind of agency that is not the kind of agency that comes from a more thorough review of our study-guide for the quiz tomorrow, however grave the stakes of that quiz may be. There is a sense of missing a kind of agency that might still be recovered but only when asked as a question: how do we change the hour? We may not want the kind of boisterous congratulation of White’s note on democracy; we might want some other time entirely. But there is going to have to be something more than the sensation that “through it all the radio is immense. It is the box we live in. The world seems very close at hand. (Countless human lives can yet be saved.).”

--Ian Storey