Cognitive Dissonance

You’d think a forecast of full sun in early June would guarantee a long day of strolling in the park, inching forward towards the solstice. You’d expect dappled light and cerulean skies, emerald grass and plantings of purple iris. Think ducks and geese padding around after their young. But the cheery little round yellow sun icon on the weather app is divorced from the actual weather. This is not because it’s been replaced by dark clouds or rain showers, but because wildfires in Saskatchewan and Manitoba have brought smoke that covers the sun and leaves the sky a greyish white non-color. The sun is there but not there. The sky suffers from a kind of amnesia, forgetting what a sunny day in June is supposed to look like. It leaves me feeling bewildered and cheated. Bad weather is one thing, but good weather in hiding is something else altogether.

Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

Climate change predates the MAGA regime by decades, of course. But there’s something Trumpian about the smoke descending. Like the wool being pulled over the eyes of those Americans who thought they were electing a Lancelot in chain mail who would ride up on a white steed and root out fraud and waste returning us to a fairy tale of civic probity. They expected a leader who would bring back a time when men were men and all the women looked like Ivanka. Imagine their dismay when the emperor turned out to be not only a naked omnivore, but a criminally negligent buffoon, a man who apparently doesn’t know emoluments from linoleum. Things are seldom what they seem. Men and women in black robes, previously arbiters of justice who were charged with passing on the constitutionality of laws and the extent to which they were being properly observed, are now dangerous radicals, the enemy of the state. Jews in the diaspora who are averse to the slaughter of civilians are accused of antisemitism while the president pals around with Holocaust deniers and terrorists wreak havoc in Washington and Boulder. How do we sort this out? In small towns like Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the center of my life for fifty years, a Norman Rockwell fantasy unfolds every day. The flag flies, a ten year old plays Little League, hamburgers and hot dogs are grilled and then one day, say last Friday, ICE agents abduct a gardener from the parking lot of a construction design business owned by two people who drew up the plans for the extension to my house. I look at the photos of these gorillas in riot gear marching around in what was for so long my home town and it doesn’t add up. I just stare at those pictures in disbelief.

The cognitive dissonance, the sun shining but not shining, is characteristic of the dual state. Refugee political scientist, Ernst Fraenkel, proposed this model after he fled Nazi Germany in 1938. He described a normative state which operates according to the rules we all recognize and a prerogative state coexisting alongside it. The prerogative state is arbitrary and violent. I find it useful to enlarge the model to include not only government but the culture as a whole. I can still register to vote. I can still go to Crooners to hear the sensational Twin Cities Latin Jazz Orchestra and I can still watch the basketball playoffs. But at the very same time, armed and masked ICE agents have invaded the town where my son went to school and people who are exercising their first amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly on university campuses have been silenced. When I graduated from Brandeis in 1966, we all got up and walked out in protest against the commencement address given by UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg because he was associated with the Vietnam War. I was not yet twenty-one and I’m not sure I understood the point of the protest but what I did understand was that in the United States of America such peaceful demonstrations were legal and an established feature of our political landscape. We knew a cloudy day from a sunny one. Brandeis is still there. Harvard and Columbia are still standing and students are graduating from these institutions, but it is not clear that the sun is still shining down on them or whether we have morphed into a society that plays at democracy like Turkey. If the weather channel predicts sunshine but all we get is haze, we have to look more deeply into the cloud of unknowing to see if there’s something we’re missing.

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