Listening to America

If democracy falls in a desert, does it make a sound?

“Missouri!” the boy screamed, pumping his fists. “Yes! Yes! YES!”

He was in front of our car, trailed by his brothers, their shoulders slumped in defeat. The little boy danced around them.

“I won, I won, I won!” he chanted. “All fifty states! Finally, MISSOURI EXISTS!”

“Happy to help,” my husband said to the kid’s dad, who smiled and escorted his champion into a camper van. My teenage children tried to suppress their laughter. They remember when they were young enough to be tricked into obedience by The License Plate Game.

The father and his sons drove away. We did not know who these people were, only that they were an American family, like us. A family out of time, playing games that have existed for as long as there have been cars and the road trips that evolved with them.

We were at The Valley of Fire, Nevada’s oldest state park. We had driven from Las Vegas, watching neon lights turn to tract homes turn to cauldrons of rock.

I was glad to get out of Las Vegas because it reminded me of the government. Decades ago, I liked it there — the artificial antiquities, the gung-ho glitz, the free-wheeling mafia ambiance — but now it felt federal. Too many things are named after indicted political donors. The underworld is just the world.

There are some places that come to life the more you know them, and some that die a slow sad death the same way.

Our hotel had windows that made everything look pink. My room looked out at planted palms and peopleless lots, an apocalypse strip, a Las Vegas too real for my taste.

In the Valley of Fire, there are no words, only pictures. From roughly 350 BC until 1150 AD, the region was inhabited by the Anasazi, an ancient Puebloan people. They lived among the red and orange sandstone, documenting their lives in writing on rock walls, petroglyphs that survived to the present.

No one is entirely clear what the pictures mean, but some seem obvious. There are drawings of animals, emblematic of a hunt. Others are thought to represent shamanic activity and religious rites.

My favorite petroglyph is of people holding hands. One thousand years later, the families around us were doing the same thing.

“La sombra!” a child shouted, pointing at her shadow looming over the narrow path. We were on the petroglyph trail, but the rocks were their own attraction. There were crevices to climb and strange patterns that emerged depending on where you stood.

“There were plants and birds and rocks and things,” I sang stupidly, because there is no smart way to sing “A Horse with No Name”, and you have to sing America in such an American desert.

In Valley of Fire, the sun bakes your brain into a tiny little dot, a pleasure point, just enough to see a few steps ahead. Who would want to see beyond that, really? Not in 2024, not anymore.

A crowd formed on the trail, and we joined to see what the fuss was about. A tiny pale blue bug was crawling across the red desert floor. None of us had seen anything like it. We all spoke different languages — Spanish and English and Hindi — but everyone was entranced by the bug.

There is no internet in Valley of Fire, so no one could look up what it was. Later, I did, and learned it was a “Blue Death-Feigning Beetle.” Of course it is, I thought. The beetle was a survivor.

It survived by pretending it was dead, like democracy.

That is my theory, anyway. By definition, the attempted murder of American democracy is a top-down phenomenon. Democracy literally means “the power of the people”. The end of democracy is signaled by the people having no power.

American democracy is not gone, but deeply diminished. Power was not surrendered but stolen: courts and corruption brought us to this precipice. It is important to remember that democracy is our power and goes beyond voting or any lone action.

Democracy is a shared power, not granted from above, but demanded from below.

Americans have been attacked by our own corrupt institutions. But there’s an assisted suicide element to the attempted murder of American democracy, and it comes from the rise of political cults. Groupthink, savior syndrome, and willingness to support cruelty at the command of a politician peaked in recent years, as Americans clung to promises of accountability that were broken, regardless of one’s political persuasion.

Those who thought institutions were out to save them learned — at a rather steep curve — that they were actually out to screw them. The more the bedrock of betrayal is revealed, the faster far-fetched convictions dissipate like sand.

Political cults are losing control as the people realize there was never a “plan” to trust. It’s everywhere: from the diminished support for right-wing fanatics like Moms for Liberty, to the collapse of the liberal-duping DOJ Infotainment Complex, to the plunging ratings of media covering a pale horse race yet again.

On an interpersonal level, at least, the proto-autocratic social order is slowly, mercifully, breaking down.

But while this erosion of delusion is welcome, there is the perilous matter of Americans checking out of politics entirely. It’s not hard to grasp why: Trump and Biden are the least popular presidential candidates ever, with penchants for coups and genocide.

There is also a sense of futility about civic engagement as the nightmare rerun election approaches. The Trump years spurred more activism and higher voter turnout than any other time in modern history, and look what it brought us — Trump, again.

And Biden, again promising he will hold Trump accountable after four years of not only refusing to do so, but enacting Trump’s own policies.

Public pullback from politics is a double-edged sword. All I know is that I want the American people wielding that sword and not the American government.

I want Americans to see their reflection in that sword and see people holding hands — like they did in the desert a millennium ago, like they do in the desert now.

American democracy is not dead. It is a Blue Death-Feigning Beetle, simulating a stupor while getting its bearings. The question is whether it can come back to life before being stomped by a rich man’s boot.

*          *          *

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the alien beef jerky began to take hold.

I remember saying something like, “We really shouldn’t have eaten jerky made from abducted cows; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar around us, and it was me shamelessly reciting Hunter S. Thompson lines, wondering if his feared and loathed bats had died of white nose syndrome, which I kept calling white noise syndrome, like a Don DeLillo Disease. My mind was floored by the roar of Reagan-era writers: the predictions that they got to make, but I have to live.

“There’s not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the ‘80s,” Thompson wrote in 1987.

We know; we are parents of our own shortchanged children now.

The Alien Beef Jerky Store is real. It is in Baker, California, which we passed on the way to Barstow from Death Valley. There is a mechanical Alien Donald Trump in the store who will tell your fortune if you feed him your money. This is how the actual Donald Trump works so I was not surprised.

We were headed to the second national park on our trip: Joshua Tree, continuing our 1980s theme. We learned that the tree from the U2 album had been murdered by overzealous fans. Like “life and love and possibilities”, its death was preordained, I thought grimly.

But the real Joshua Tree was not what I expected. I predicted crowds and got peace. The forecast said floods and we were rewarded with rainbows. The Joshua tree was not a tree, but a giant yucca plant, startling without being imposing, twisted in a way that asks you to look beyond it instead of head on.

The botanist George Washington Carver said that if you love a plant enough, it will reveal to you its secrets. I believe this. I suspect that the Joshua tree has been told too much by too many people who were too stoned, and has decided it is done communing with mankind.

Maybe it’s angry about 2019, when hordes descended upon the park and vandalized it. Or by climate change, which threatens its existence. Maybe the Joshua tree wants to tell us to get lost. Either way, I felt little connection other than aesthetic appreciation.

Of greater interest to me was a field of cholla cacti, which we encountered as the sun set, making them backlit like neon, a botanical Vegas. Rumor has it the cholla cactus likes to jump out and stab people. I did not know this and walked through a field of them at dusk with no trouble at all.

The cholla cacti resembled families or groups of friends. Some looked like couples in love. Others looked like baby cacti, protected by elders. I felt that deep connection to which Carver referred. Maybe that is why they refrained from stabbing me.

At sunrise the next day, we drove to the park for our first hike: a two-mile trail that took us past a variety of plants and hulking boulders.

“What if those boulders are actually giant eggs?” my son asked midway through. “And they’ve been eggs the whole time, growing things inside them, waiting for the moment to hatch.”

I have been unable to see Joshua Tree National Park any other way since he said this.

*          *          *

At the Joshua Tree visitor’s center there is a series of messages hung on strings. Visitors are invited to write down what changes they have noticed in their environment over the past few decades.

I read each handwritten note, from New Orleans (“We’re sinking”) to New Zealand (“Glaciers are melting”). People from around the world told of how their homelands had changed, lost to urban development or climate catastrophe. Poland, the Navajo Nation, Holland, Alaska: no place is spared.

There was something about seeing it laid out in such a human way — the distinctive handwriting, the personal memories — that captured the profundity of the loss, but also felt strangely reassuring.

These were not anonymous bots, but real people who love nature so much they traveled all the way to California to see it, and who felt compelled to bear witness to what their own communities had endured. Among the tales of tragedy were a few of triumph, from people who fought industrialization, and won.

*          *          *

Since 2016, I have been trying to take my children to all the national parks before they disappear. Every time we go, I stay offline, or try to. Every time we return, it is to news of disasters.

This March was the first time I could not discern what had happened while I had been away, no matter how hard I tried.

News outlets have been so gutted, algorithms so rigged, that there is no reliable way to get information. I did not have the patience to decode euphemistic headlines about genocide or hop a paywall or parse conspiracy theories about a collapsed bridge or a missing princess until I got to the grains of truth.

Americans have checked out of politics in part because it is so difficult to check back in. Not only difficult in an emotional sense, because you are forced to confront innumerable horrors, but in a practical sense.

There is no reliable place to get information. There is nothing affordable, accessible, and accurate — not in America, not anymore.

And maybe we are united in that absence — in that longing for some stable source that is also honest, and fair, and kind.

Maybe we are all playing a version of The License Plate Game. Eying each other’s cars as we navigate a lonely road, looking for signs that Americans still look out for each other, even as our institutions treat us as disposable.

Missouri still exists, Valley of Fire has not burned down, the Joshua trees are still standing. And so are all the people who visit, including Americans looking for preemptive reprieve in a foreboding year. Americans who do not know each other, but know we deserve better than what we’ve got.

Americans who are full of power, if only we could love each other enough to reveal it.

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Valley of Fire, photographed by my daughter, March 2024.

A Joshua Tree at the end of a rainbow.

Alien beef jerky, made from real abducted cows!

Joshua Tree at night.

Getting ready to hatch!

Las Vegas, Nevada.

The notes at the Joshua Tree Visitor’s Center.