So Far Gone

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every firestorm, hurricane, and melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical political and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric - and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

But I’m starting to think Thoreau might have been full of shit. If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.

it was all just part of a long sad cultural slide that he’d had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president).

How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissures bubbling up under the surface, and what—we were just supposed to go on with our lives? Wake up the next day like nothing happened, like we hadn’t lost our minds? Just turn the page, to the baseball scores or the horoscopes or celebrity birthdays? (Nothing to see here, just America.)

I told you: that’s not how the Bible works, Rhys. It’s a living document.” “It’s not, Shane.” “Believe what you want.” Shane was getting red-faced. “But I saw a thing on-line that explained the whole deal.” He was always seeing things on-line that explained the whole deal. Or deals on-line that explained the whole thing.

We all have to live through a dark season now and then.

No, this social distancing was nothing new; she and her father had been at least six feet apart for twenty years.

Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family. But, if he was being honest, it wasn’t those people,

It changed Shane, this mixture of paranoid masculinity and Apocalyptic Christian absolutism: a dark communion of fear and testosterone.

Well, the whole tradition of Western thought and philosophy is steeped in humanism, right? Pythagoras, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius. Even something like the Upanishads. Watts, Sun Tzu, ethics, art theory, Sontag, nineteenth-century economics—it all proceeds from the human mind, deals first with human experience. But naturalism, environmental philosophy, which put us on a neutral footing with the world around us, these are barely fifty years old.

no longer was the fringe on the fringe. She explained to him that state legislators, sheriffs, and county commissioners—even members of Congress—openly expressed beliefs that would have gotten them labeled as members of a hate group a few years earlier, or at least as extremists, or unelectable loons. “We’ve got antivaxers and tax protestors, flat-Earth school board members and at least one posse comitatus county commissioner. Oh, there’s also a rural sheriff who sits in the public library all day looking for books about gay penguins so he can confiscate them. We’re on the border of Bizarroland out here.

the world was the world, and we merely passed through it: twenty-some thousand sunrises, each one with the power to renew us.

Lucy could remember when a fight at a school board meeting would be unimaginable (Fight over what? Lunch lady uniforms? Custodian pay?) but now, with everyone on edge, still pissed off by school closures during the pandemic, angry about the teaching of sex ed or evolution or drag queens or gay rights, or about some book no one had checked out from the school library in a decade, Random Yelling was practically an agenda item.

They could never have imagined that he was a kid like them at one time, and that, one day, they would be as old and as brittle as he was now. Of course not. No one could. He hadn’t seen his grandfather or his uncles or his parents as the children they once were. They were another species, dinosaurs.

(celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president).

It was a kind of delusional self-centeredness, connecting his failure as a writer to the culture’s growing rejection of science, philosophy, and reason, of basic common sense.

Well,” her mother had said, “essays are stories for readers who care more about ideas than they do people.

It was a streak that ended satisfyingly at first, and then—not so much.

Shane had traded his mild drug habit for a Jesus-and-AM radio addiction—“real Jews” and “real patriots” and “Black-on-white crime” and “owning the libs” and the “lame-stream media” and the “vast conspiracy” perpetrated on “real Americans,” by which Shane always meant people like him. This raw sewage had been seeping into American drinking water for years, until it eventually contaminated the mainstream, and won over enough Shanes to convince the chattering TV heads and Twitter-taters that such half-assed conspiracies were a legitimate part of the body politic, that somehow, they had to do with white, working-class people getting the short end of some imaginary economic stick.

This was the danger of winding up a toy like Shane. He could go on for hours like this, weaving every loose strand into a blanket of conspiratorial idiocy

But I saw a thing on-line that explained the whole deal.” He was always seeing things on-line that explained the whole deal. Or deals on-line that explained the whole thing.

But his grandchildren just stared at him, apparently as uninterested in nuance and complexity as everyone else in the world.

TikToks and Instagram posts, insisting that laughter was the best exercise for strengthening facial muscles. Here was the only proper use for this terrible pocket-size anxiety-dealing bartender, Kinnick decided, and he raced home to share the appropriate videos with the kids on his iPhone. “Watch this dog sing ‘Happy Birthday’!” One day, after dinner, while the kids cleared the table, Bethany put her hand out and touched Rhys’s stitched, stapled, and resculpted face. “I kind of like it,” she said. “You’re softer now.

It was possible to disappear from others' lives, of course – from Lucy's, from Bethany's – but he suspected that when he woke up tomorrow, wherever he was, the person he really wanted to never see again would be staring right back in the mirror. 'Maybe don't get a mirror', he thought, and this made him smile.

had rebuilt himself up there, following the hardest season of his life—at least until now. There were trees he would miss like old friends, and cloudless night skies, and surreal dawn light, and the tracks of visitors in the fresh snow.

For weeks after nearly being killed, Rhys felt like they were all still in danger. He slept poorly, was always on edge, and, at times, felt totally bereft. Post-traumatic stress, his doctor said. Kinnick wasn't sure if the doctor was diagnosing him or the world.

It, Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathrooms.