Indigo Buntings, Mad Max, and the Fire I’m Feeling

Thoughts on America - July 4th, 2024

Brad Vogel

Earlier today, I saw a bright metallic blue bird fly by, and I thought it was an Eastern Bluebird, relatively common. But then I realized, as it alighted in a pine tree, that it was an indigo bunting. Something far rarer for me. And I took it as a good omen in these dark times for our country. The land, nature persists on its longer arc outside our frenzies, and I find what solace I can there.

But then, as this Independence Day wore on, I saw it again. I saw it like a little droplet of pure glacial water zipping across a field after its mate. And I kept seeing it. Then it perched atop the pine tree and sang and sang and sang. Clear and melodious and just for me and some friends. It was a joyful, promising thing I’ve never experienced. Something that felt impossible, really. But that suddenly became real - and then, even normal, almost mundane.

I felt like I needed that reminder. Good things, beautiful things that seem impossible, that seem like they require a habitat that no longer exists…are there. When a gem somehow emerges, cherish it. We have to remember that.

But with a country, of course, if it’s one that has any shred of self-government in the foundational mix, that rare bird does not just fly in from the treeline. We have to invite it in, build the micro-habitat, keep the precious thing alive, tend to its wings and plumage and work together to make the hard-to-describe beauty of the song trill forth in a way that seems like magic when it’s heard.

It seems, lately, we might need more brutal allegories, though. This country has been marred by so, so many bad things. But as friends of mine dismiss the entire concept of the rule of law, the Supreme Court places the president above the law formally, and other friends refuse to leave the comfort of the numbness of despair as we face the most pivotal election of American history, I have to say…wake up, slap yourself in the face if you have to, shake it out, get anything you can grab in your holsters, saddle up, scream out any incoherent battle cry you need to, and prepare to ride hard for the next four months with me. I rip the cap off my canteen and fling its contents in your face and mine: WAKE UP!! IT’S TIME!!

I’ve been doing my best to cling to and savor the respite from a daily focus on national politics across the Biden years - an attempt to build up a reservoir of energy that I knew I’d likely need in a homestretch going into this fall’s election. And Monday’s devastating and unforgivable SCOTUS ruling was like a spike down into that underground tank. All the alarms and sirens are blaring. It’s been feeling a lot like what I know of Weimar-era Germany: a country ripping off on two diametrically opposed socio-cultural arcs at the same time - and I hope there are enough connectors and commonality left in the middle to hold it all together.

If you need a full Hobbesian tabeleau, which is somewhere I try not to go, but sometimes, as after reading Saramago’s Blindess, I do….then here you go. I feel like a great desert lies ahead of us, and we can either choose to get in the battered car full of questionable stains we find before us and set out to Mad Max across the wasteland, thwart the psychotic gangs preying on the path, and get to the other side to build a more verdant oasis at least. Or we can try to walk - and essentially have no chance at the start. America is, in this time we’ve been born into, what we’ve got. And once you look at the chassis of the thing, you realize it is, in fact, remarkable in conception in its own time, almost impossible that it made it to this date, interesting that it’s been modified for the better somehow along the way at many points - even if the remnants of the chains that had to be blasted off with a cutting torch give shudders and the thought of how many have been run over wrongly and unjustly by the vehicle give sober pause. Misguided people have locked off certain parts and made some of the seats impossible to sit in. But there it is. And if we do not get in and grab the wheel of this thing, some truly crazy, violent, nihilistic motherfuckers are going to take hold and possibly kill us all or leave us stranded in the desert with the vehicle destroyed beyond repair.

Yes, life’s been shitty. Yes, Gen Zeois and friends, you have ever right to be deeply cynical and withdrawn when the scale of hopelessness seems to extend to the very planet’s capacity to sustain life. But I hope you’ll find some way to wave off the haze, beat the distractions back from you with a chair, accept imperfections and recognize an existential crucible when you see one.

Our ability to function as a country in a way that permits change - our ability to overcome our own flaws through process rather than be subject to the whims of uncontrolled violence - is at grave risk. And quite frankly, a significant portion of the world’s ability to address the climate crisis hangs in the balance to, to extend the significance of the thing to its greater implications beyond mere politics.

Defeating Trump in November is the single most important thing I can think of since I’ve been conscious in terms of the impacts that would flow from it for future generations. How a convicted felon who incited an insurrection seeking to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, someone who has shown complete contempt for the country’s history and norms, someone who is devoid of any form of virtue or responsibility…how that person is the candidate of a major party for President of the United States is beyond me. He’s far more dangerous this time, ready for revenge and facing even weaker opposition and institutional roadblocks. Fifteen years ago, rural white men I know in the midwest would have smelled the snake oil he’s awash in from five miles away and said he was a joke. But now they’re putting signs up on their barns for him, grabbing the jug of snake oil to swig it hard, and I have to wonder if this is all about race in the end; the Democrats have been horrible about showing they understand and can even converse with much less care about rural and small town people, but many of the voters there have also decided to take up Trump’s invitation to give in to their insecurities and be their worst selves. And many urban voters proudly still don’t know anything about “flyover states” or lifeways there in ways that are willfully dismissive and unhelpful. We really need a national pen-pal and cultural exchange system to get these disparate pools of people to find humanity in each other again.

I’ve been loathe to let myself get ripped out of my self protective stupor. But flames of anger surged through me on Monday as the SCOTUS ruling granting the president immunity from criminal laws. It really is a hacking away down at the roots of the entire tree, it upends yet more premises so fundamental to the country that nobody thought they would ever have to be formally articulated: no man is above the law…and America doesn’t have an f-ing king. It’s particularly galling to watch John Roberts abandon any sense of caring about the Supreme Court’s reputation as an institution with all the 6-3 rulings this summer, this immunity ruling in particular. He knows better and did it anyway - with carefully crafted sophistry to make it appear reasonable. And it’s going to be incredibly difficult to undo this damage, this slip down the dark Roman way. Perhaps I’ll write at greater depth about what we can try to do to overturn that bullshit, nearly impossible as it is, as well as the merits of the various SCOTUS reforms people have been bandying about.

The temptation to zen out going into this fall’s presidential election is high. But it’s time to resist it and engage like your life depends on it. Because even if yours doesn’t, your friend’s, your relative’s, your neighbor’s very well might. Put on your sharpest spurs. Grab the wheel. Let’s keep this impossible indigo bunting alive and singing somehow. And build a greener oasis on the other side of the desert when we get there.