I am writing this from New Haven, Connecticut, a place I have some happy memories attached to. I also love a gritty port town, especially one with excellent pizza and used bookstores. This time I am here with a group of students from my high school competing in a model congress competition at Yale. While I have enjoyed walking around the campus, eating at Frank Pepe's and other fine dining establishments, browsing the Grey Matter bookstore, and drinking Common Grounds' coffee, I am feeling pangs of dread and a certain kind of spiritual suffocation.
Some of this comes from students in the model congress seeing the whole thing as some kind of joke. During the presidential election at the start a student gave a lazy, tossed-off speech threatening to invade Canada. Evidently he thought this was funny. It was telling that the three girls in the running constructed serious speeches full of ideas, while two of the four boys recited MAGA rhetoric without proposing anything concrete. It seemed to encapsulate the rising tide of misogyny in this country that reacts to girls being better at a lot of things because they actually work hard by trying to subjugate them instead of demanding more from young men.
Other dread comes from the stark contrasts one sees walking around New Haven. Our hotel is near the Green, where one often sees homeless people and poor and working-class residents catching the bus just two blocks from a university with a $41 billion endowment. I have seen starker contrasts of wealth and poverty in Manhattan, but the fact that the contrast comes from a "non-profit" educational institution just seems to make it worse. The whole scene lays this country's failures bare.
Even worse, today is the dreaded "Santa Con," when America's stupidest and loudest suburban frat and sorority types converge on city centers to get drunk and act even more brain dead than they do on an average day. Walking the streets around my hotel feels suffocating, and not just because of the clouds of cheap weed smoke. Perhaps it's fitting that Trump has returned to the White House, since he reflects the trashy, decadent nature of the nation he is about to rule over.
It probably hasn't helped my mood that my big used book store score was a copy of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia. I have felt it to be quite bracing, and I maybe am absorbing his deep critique of American life at a particularly bad time. Since the election I have been embracing a fundamental pessimism about certain aspects of American life. At base, I think it's obvious that most people have a completely nihilistic attitude about public life and what they owe to others. Much as Adorno worried, the processes of more modern capitalism have shredded individuality and reduced it into nothing more than consumer desire. Life will go on, there will still be good books, pizza, and coffee in the world, but I don't expect much of anything to get better soon. As the last few days have made clear, the younger generation is most definitely not going to save us. There are plenty of exceptional young people, but they are being eaten up by the ever-growing adherents to nihilism. That's my sad report from New Haven.
