After Reading Jill Lepore*

We subsist on fictions and vote our conscience, though few of us have a conscience that is actually our own and not a pastiche of previous fictions passed down to us. We either believe too much in past fictions or rely too much on future fictions created by PAC’s with dark money, Republican politicians and even certain historians—as historian Jill Lepore exposes in this slight but powerful book—most all of whom have abandoned the present, having been overwhelmed by the amount of information there and the social pressures of interpretation.

We aid and abet big lies, the bigger the lie the better, there being little or no truth left to tell, having been lied to ourselves by those who know better and those who know next to nothing, all those who believe the lie(s) the present is now predicated upon. Therefore, only half-truths are allowed to exist, the kind of truths that we are comfortable with and explain the present to us in terms we understand to be self-evident. 

Thus the national story we tell ourselves is carved up between those who want a better world, one along the lines first announced in Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (and The Bill of Rights); those who like the world just the way it is, having found the ways and means of gaining financial and political power and doing everything they can to hold on to it; those who liked what they had but who were dispossessed from the very beginning and are still trying claim their basic human rights; and those who don’t like what they presently have, feeling the past is being stolen from them and re-purposed for All the People regardless of color, creed, or Zip Code Redistricting demographics.

I add to the above these two small, but select, sub-groups: 1) those who can think for themselves but don’t know what they want, and 2) those who know what they want but can’t think for themselves.

*This America: The Case for the Nation, by Jill Lepore. Liveright/Norton, 2019.

Detail, Collage, ‘Far From The Madding Eternity’, 8” x 12”, magazine, paint, glue, spray lacquer, 2021