Iowa

Dan Flavin, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972.

As a nation turns its lonely eyes to DiMaggio Des Moines, one can't help but consider how remarkable it is that so much change should be collapsed into a single time and place. A second- or third-place finish shouldn't spell doom for any of the Democratic candidates, but it will pave the likely way for the winner. Coming as this primary does now just days into the new year lends it a significance above and beyond that it gained in 2000, when John Kerry steamrolled his way to victory and never looked back after squashing Howard Dean in Iowa. It's hardly desirable to lend so much decisionmaking authority to some marginal fraction of a state whose population is already low. But you look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel that you have, not the one you want.

And now that that light's here, it's easy to forget that the last four years have felt so desperate and dark. Reading Yglesias's post on David Simon's The Wire and despair makes me that hope is a kind of hindsight. It's a mechanism, just a way to assess disappointments and frustrations and deal and continue. Simon might be the sort to say that one can't look back because the hits never stop coming. "The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment." That sounds like the conclusion that pere Roth's character draws in The Plot Against America, and which he holds to until the very end, despite the novel's tidy finish—which Roth writes with nearly comic ease, like tying a shoe's laces. It doesn't sound to me like a copout, either. Pere Roth got it right in that book. Things didn't work out fine in the end though it appeared that they did: those dark portents weren't false even if circumstances never conspired to raise a fascist flag over America. And the politicians and journalists and critics who have shown how the Bush administration has transformed the nation in dangerous ways are as right as Moishe the Beadle, even if that danger is never totally realized. Isn't hope the wrong response, isn't that tantamount to not quite admitting the nature of the threat? And yet of course it is impossible to go around feeling maximally despairing all the time, and if there's any truth circumscribed by the feelings that we have when we are not concentrating and the things we do when we are not provoked, it's not warranted to fret forever.