On being an unsuccessful writer two weeks before Trump takes office a second time

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'" - from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Early in 2020, The New Yorker published a George Saunders story entitled "Love Letter." It's an epistolary tale of a grandfather and his grandson in a much-closer-to-a-totalitarian-state-than-before in the aftermath of a then-theoretical second Trump term. Trump is not mentioned, but it is very clear that's the context involved. The grandfather is conflicted. Part of him wants to counsel his grandson to lay low, to make his way in the dangerous new landscape of America the best he can, because doing this and putting himself in a stronger position socially and financially is his best chance for being able to help the people he cares about. Open resistance is not a good strategy, because it only leads to one becoming weak. At the same time, the grandfather knows that what the government is doing to the people his grandson cares about is wrong, and he wants there to be some way to fight back. There is an underlying current in the story of the grandfather feeling he needs to explain to the grandson how older people allowed the world to get like this. His explanations are the only ones a culpable generation can offer: we didn't know it would get this bad, we'd have done more if we knew, we did what we could, but what could we really do?

When Saunders reconsidered the story recently, he expressed his hope that it was more than "just an opinion piece dressed up as a piece of fiction." Of course, even if it was a little too "on the nose," as he put it, that wouldn't have necessarily ruined it. There are plenty of stories that come across as direct commentaries on contemporary political situations that are nonetheless masterpieces, from Wizard of Oz to the works of Aristophanes to Citizen Kane to All the President's Men and on and on. Heck, even Ayn Rand's novels have plenty of people who love them, and they're basically political theory dressed up as novels.  

Of course it was a good story. It was George Saunders. But there was still something that bothered me about it. Coming at the time it did, it couldn't help but be an admonition to its readers: In the fateful election of 2020, when democracy hangs in the balance, what will you do? Will you be able to face your grandchildren when they ask you about it? It was much more of a call to specific action than most stories are. That means that part of evaluating it should go beyond normal literary considerations, such as whether the characters were believable and affecting, and include questioning whether the piece was effective at one of its evident purposes, which was to persuade citizens to undertake political action. 

My perhaps somewhat peevish reaction to the story

Now that we have survived the election of 2020 only to lose in 2024, my reaction is not totally unlike that of the grandfather: What could I have done? What should I have done? Or even: I did what I could, but I wasn't in a position to do much, so my involvement didn't help, echoing a line of the grandfather to his grandson that getting involved would not help. If "Love Letter" is a challenge to its readers to do something, then my reaction to that injunction goes something like this:

• I voted for the right candidate, because I did the minimum that a citizen in a democracy can do, which is to fulfill what Lionel Trilling called the "moral responsibility to be intelligent." That is, I did enough work to vote for the right person.
• Of course, in our system, I get the same number of votes as people who didn't do the work. So my vote isn't worth that much.
• You could argue that I have a responsibility to try to persuade others, and I did, but persuading anyone of anything is very hard. Past a certain age, most people really don't change their minds about big stuff more than a handful of times in their lives. 
• And in any event, whom would I be persuading? I don't have much of a platform. I wish I had acquired a platform through my writing, but whether through lack of talent, lack of focus, or bad luck, I don't. 
• Even if I did have a platform, what would I do? If we consider "Love Letter" not as a detached work of art but as an attempt by a human writer named George Saunders to influence an election, what did Saunders really do with his platform? He wrote a story in the New Yorker, where the majority of readers probably already agreed with him.
• That story, rather than offer readers practical advice for how to get the outcome in the election that author and most of his readers alike agree would be the desirable one, did what literature often does. It didn't really propose a solution, but instead did a good job of describing the problem. Which is great for feeling seen, but not so great for getting the results one wants.
• Which is all to say that even if I had succeeded as an author enough to have significant numbers of people listen to what I have to say, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much with it. I can't even convince my sister-in-law in Ohio that Trump is bad for the country; what am I going to do to change the outcome of an election? 
• The story ultimately feels like a human author trying to pass the problem off to his readers, most of whom have far less ability to do anything that he does. It feels unfair.   

So that's one level of reaction I have to Saunders' story. The other level is somehow even more depressing. 

It's always frustrating to fail at writing, but it's especially so now

There is a weird feedback loop of circular logic in America whereby we assume that if someone is rich and famous, they deserve to be, so they tend to stay that way. And if someone isn't, they get dismissed, because if they knew what they were talking about, how come they aren't rich and famous? We assume winners win because they deserve to win, and losers lose because they are losers.

Faced with this kind of faith in the self-evidentiary logic of outcomes in America, the non-rich, non-famous class has only a couple of choices. We can accept our fate and turn inward, trying to focus on self-improvement in small and humble ways. We can practice a form of idolatry toward the chosen class and look up to them, following them on social media and hoping at most to be able to brush near their greatness, to one day get a like from them or to touch the hem of their garments as they pass by. Or we can press on with a quixotic quest to join their ranks, ignoring the odds and focusing only on the outliers, the occasional examples of people who cross the divide from the bungled and the botched into the successful.

Maybe I've been the bad reader all along, and this guy the good reader of the world, even if he hasn't read the book he's holding. 

Of course, many people have no desire to be rich or famous, and they live happy lives ignoring celebrities, politicians, and magnates alike. They are probably the wisest, and I'd be happy to join their ranks, except that what I most want to do in life is write, and I don't consider my writing to be successful if nobody reads it. There is an aspect of needing public cooperation to my goals in life. I don't want to be rich, and I don't need to be famous in the sense of being a household word in every home. I'm sure most Americans don't know who George Saunders is, either. Enough do, though, that he can rest assured his ideas have propagated in the world and will survive him. That may not matter in a political sense, but I do think that once ideas escape into the world, they never really go away. Saunders will live forever. I don't have that assurance. 

I live inside my head most of the time, and my head is full of stories and ideas that seem to me to have value, so I can't rest until I've gotten them outside my head and onto paper in the best way I can. I'm on the other side of fifty now, and it's increasingly unlikely anyone is ever going to read what I've written in sufficient numbers for it to matter. 

I should keep pressing on anyway, assured that even if I don't succeed at my goal, the presence of those stories and thoughts that won't go away is evidence that tending to them is what I should be doing with my time. I should have faith that they're there for a reason. But the election of Trump--again--and the concurrent existence of so many do-nothing celebrities and hangers-on and influencers and social media personalities, all of whom get to share their vapid ideas with so many, makes me think that there just is no reason or order or meaning to anything. The self-evidentiary logic of America is right. I'm not succeeding because I'm not chosen for success. I lack talent or charm or charisma or good looks or the right blood in my veins. The success of someone who seems to me to be so undeserving is proof that I have misread the world entirely. And if I can't read the world right, why should anyone want to read what I've written?