2020: The Great American Crack-Up
As we look forward to 2021, we dream of a year defined by redemption and healing. When we look back at 2020, it’s hard to see anything but failure and pain.
As America wound down its surreal horror film of a summer, I retreated to the North Carolina mountains to get myself right, following in the famously doomed footsteps of a certain celebrated writer some 85 years ago. But where F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn in the midst of a very public, slow-motion nervous breakdown — he literally declared his own emotional bankruptcy in an essay titled “The Crack-Up” — I was getting by OK. Surviving against all odds.
Instead it was my country that was looking frail, reeling from the twin sucker punches of pandemic and civil unrest: morally adrift, detached from obvious realities, dangerously intoxicated by its own mythology, looking increasingly irrelevant and even foolish on the world stage. Like the once all-conquering Fitzgerald, my nation was naked, onstage, right in the middle of its own crack-up. August felt like rock bottom but here we are again — or rather still — numbers spiking and horrific winter unfolding while a lame-duck President fritters away his last weeks in an orgy of legal charades and fundraising grifts.
