Great; Again.

Great; Again.

No one liked the Compromise. That’s how it usually goes. The middle is the place where most people least like to meet.

You get to the bargaining table sure of what’s what, what’s right, and what’s yours. You’ve got your plans and they’ve got theirs: only difference is yours are better and you’re smarter than they are by 10% — at least.

By and by, you concede here and you concede there. Though you might let go of a few minor things, trinkets really, you hold fast to the real important stuff. You draw lines in the sand and swear that that one thing is sacred, something you’ll never relinquish. That’s right, I’m mixing my metaphors: this is a bargaining table set up on sand. It’s a beachfront bargaining table.

Of course, in order to get the stubborn nimrods you’re at loggerheads with to listen to any common sense, it turns out that nothing is sacred, and that those lines you drew in the sand can be swept away pretty quickly. So what? No big deal, you think, sweat forming salty little ponds on your forehead. You pull back and they pull back and in the end both of you give up more than you had intended and neither of you got what you were really after to begin with.

It was no different with the Compromise.

Just over half the country sat on one side of the table and just under half sat on the other. It wasn’t that simple, naturally. First off, no one was sitting. Tense events like these aren’t meant for sitting or sitters: it was a standing room only, jockey-for-line-of-sight kind of crowd. Second, each side had divisions within them, too. In fact, there were so many divisions that, if you were some kind of courtroom artist, hired to do the whole scene in watercolors exactly as you saw it, there would be no table at all. There would just be a whole lot of people yelling at each other and themselves. No one sitting.

Suffice to say, though there were many sides within each side, most people made do with being on this end, or on that end.

It started in the second or third week of that November that you won’t find in any history books anymore. Does that not make sense to you? Good, because it’s nonsense — but I’ll get back to that.

As I was saying, it was the third or fourth week of that now disappeared month. It took a few weeks for things to shake out from the big event earlier in the month. Strictly speaking, that event, much like the month itself, now never happened

.

I’m sorry. What I mean to say is that it did happen once, but now we’ve decided that it didn’t. Now it didn’t happen, though once it did. Its happening happened once, but that’s happenstance.

By the middle to late stages of that non-month, the results of the non-event were pretty clear. And, surprisingly, most of the country was pretty relieved. It didn’t really matter which end of the negotiating table you found yourself metaphorically sitting on: most everyone in the country agreed that the right choice had been made. Choosing the other thing, though oddly near and dear to the hearts of many, brought with it lots of strife and tumult and an abundance of heartburn. Choosing that other thing would have meant plenty more protests in the streets, foreclosed homes, broken promises, lead pipes, abortion clinic bombings, South Sea military aggression, Arctic drilling, medical malpractice, and more broken promises. Of course, some of those things would happen regardless of which choice had been made. Still, there was a sense that choosing the thing that hadn’t been chosen would have brought with it more of the above misery, plus maybe other kinds I forgot to list.

Once everyone took stock of the situation and enjoyed that sigh of relief, a collective thought came to everyone’s mind. Actually, it was more like a collective inner dialogue.

‘Well, what are we going to do about the past four years?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it all seems well and good that enough people made the right choice this time, but, you know, there are still a lot of hurt feelings and upset stomachs about everything that’s happened the past four years.’

‘That’s true.’

‘It’d be nice to think that, now that we’ve chosen this other path, we’ll all get along a little better. But, it also seems like some people might have scores to settle. And other people, especially those who didn’t make the sensible choice this time, might resent being on the outside looking in. They might clamor for a return to the sort of situation we’re just now climbing out of.’

‘That’s not good.’

‘It seems like we won’t be able to go forward unless we think about what we’re leaving behind. It feels like we’ve got to really sit down and talk about this so that we learn something for once. It’s my sense that this might be our last chance; it might be that the next time we’re torn asunder, we won’t be so easy to put back together again.’

‘Oh.’

As you can imagine, not everyone’s thought bubbles had the same words inside. But, in the way that every graduation speech sounds different even though they all pretty much end up saying the same thing, everyone’s dialogue came out mostly alike.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving was just around the corner. In between mail-ordering their turkeys, debating the relative merits of side dishes and bemoaning the losses of football and other blood sports to the vagaries of a disease compounded by incompetence, most of the country informally agreed to use the occasion to have a good old-fashioned talk about the pesky past four years.

Unfortunately, the conversations were, by and large, neither like the meat of a turkey nor well-thought out like a Westchester County centerpiece. Instead, most of the talks were half-baked like so many pumpkin pies, juicy like poorly mashed mashed potatoes and, clearly, messy.

Those on the wrong side of history felt wronged by the sudden flurry of accusations slapped on their plates. After all, they had various reasons for making the choices they had made four years ago and very few of them had anticipated all the other bad things that would come trailing after. They had wanted more jobs or lower taxes or bigger guns or smaller bills or a return to some time that never really existed except in their heads and, in ceramic form, as advertised on the back page of Parade Magazine.

The misogyny, misanthropy, usury, pillory, inhumanity, bigamy, and dishonesty? Well, they certainly hadn’t wanted all of that — at least, not in so many words. Not explicitly.

(It’s worth noting that a great many people did want some of the above and celebrated its arrival. But even they were overwhelmed by how sour success tasted.)

As for those on the right side of history, now that they had a taste for victory, they were coming back for seconds. And there was no clearer path to satisfaction from the main course of electoral triumph than a dessert platter of revenge.

They demanded apologies from their neighbors, from celebrities, from corporations, from judges, senators and secretaries of state. They demanded commissions and documented hearings. They wanted some people to step down, other people to languish behind jail cell bars, and others still to be tarred and feathered for primetime public consumption. They wanted statues toppled. They wanted streets to be renamed and then torn from the ground, removal being the first step towards recovery.

(It’s worth noting that a great many of these things were noble causes and were long overdue in getting done. But it was the velocity of their ferocity that caught some off balance).

More than anything, they wanted you, dear father/mother/sister/brother/aunt/uncle/grandpa/grandma/significant other, to explain how you could have been so stupid to have voted the way you did in the first place?

Suffice to say, it was an unhappy Thanksgiving, made all the more difficult thanks to the trouble involved in passing a plate of peas to someone sitting six feet away.

Clearly, the country decided, this wouldn’t do. The future was only looking more fraught, not less. Anger was boiling instead of simmering.

After the dirty dishes had been cleaned and the broken dishes had been vacuumed, a collective agreement was reached. Something had to be done. And this time, it wouldn’t be done informally.

In big cities, small cities, city parks, trailer parks, amusement parks and parking lots all across the country, the people assembled. On account of the persistent pestilence, masks were encouraged; only the most intractable refused to don them. As it turns out, the national temperament was just as cold as the weather. Call it Nature’s ‘Got Ya’ joke. Snow was being measured in inches as far south as Tuscaloosa; spine surgeons were celebrating all the backs thrown out shoveling the stuff all the way from Walla Walla to Forty Fort.

Those who had covered their faces found themselves well-prepared for the chill. Those who hadn’t found themselves grumbling about the injustice of it all on their long rides home.

Not surprisingly, given how topsy-turvy the whole planet had been over the past four years, momentum trickled upward. These local conversations gradually became county-wide assemblies, regional meetings, state sessions and, finally, federal doo-dads. Committees were formed. Declarations were made. Grand juries were convened. There was much to-do when it came to figuring out what to do.

Democracy, after having its nose rubbed in a carpet stain of its own making, was proudly wagging its tail, eager to prove it still served a purpose.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to cobble together a committee, to convene a quorum and to confab with comrades than it is to make any kind of decision. It wasn’t for a lack of energy or ambition. A great many banners were made. Commemorative stamps were sold. Each member of every single newly-formed body had their own letterhead with all the requisite mottos, insignias and cruise scripts.

The only thing left was for something to be done.

As I said, negotiation is a messy, ugly process. The only thing everyone came to the table agreeing on was that, without some kind of concerted action, the future looked eerily like a tire fire on Venus, and less scenic too.

But —

Would there be arrests, and if so, who would be held accountable? (The judges, the donors, the police, the governors, the voters, the rich, the really rich, the algorithms, the media…)

Would there be truth and reconciliation sessions to get to the bottom of what had really happened? (My truth, your truth, the Truth, The Truth, false bottoms.)

Would there be pardons? (For the aggrieved, for the aggrievers, for the little things, for the big things, for the things that no one knew had happened until the pardons had been issued.)

Would there be apologies? (Heartfelt, written, written in blood, spoken, tweeted, mimed, collective, individual, monetary.)

Would there be redistribution? (Of wealth, of arms, of the presses, of the land, of the power, of the people.)

Would anything change?

Given all the bickering, all the pride and all the misguided bullheadedness involved, it seemed, for some time, that these questions would not be hurdles but very solid walls, the colliding into which would bring things to a destructive stop.

Time, though, was very much of the essence. Much like a group of friends unsure of where to eat but very sure of their hunger, all of us together had sort of figured that getting a decision together by the New Year was paramount. While things like months and years are arbitrary human constructs mostly meant to sell calendars and annual bus passes, they are very useful constructs indeed. We had a deadline and there would be no extensions. Despite all the bickering, bartering, horse trading and name calling, we would have an agreement by the end of the month.

It is possible that the Compromise, as imperfect as it is, came out so poorly because of the self-imposed deadline. In fact, many have argued that a decision as serious as this one with an untold number of ramifications had no business being reached in a little over eighteen days. It took all of the rest of us using our loudest voices to shout down those that said that it was ludicrous to rush to an arrangement like this, especially when it seemed apparent that, not only were we trying to get a consensus before New Years, but that most of were even trying to beat the clock before Christmas — on account of the traffic.

Truth be told, we maybe could have spent a little more time on the matter. Perhaps we hadn’t needed to get things wrapped up, bow on top, by December 24.

Point conceded.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like we took a perfectly crafted souffle out of the oven too fast. We weren’t waiting for the paint to dry before putting on a new coat at the Sistine Chapel. While we did rush the whole thing and certainly did get a quite awful Compromise out of it, there’s no telling how much worse things would have been if we’d taken any longer.

After all, we’re dealing with people, here — and Americans, to boot.

Amongst all the animals, it’s hard to find ones so angry as the primate. Amongst the primates, it’s hard to find ones so stupid as the human. And amongst the humans, it’s impossible to find ones so American as the Americans.

Giving it any more time would have been like leaving the souffle in the oven an extra decade or too.

Neither side of the table was very likely to get any friendlier or any more understanding of the other. Those who hadn’t yet seen the light had probably gotten quite comfortable seeing in the dark. All the good in people’s hearts had dried up during four years of intolerable drought; kindness was a thing found on bumper stickers and quarter-machine necklaces but otherwise extinct in the wild.

So, yes, we took the express lane and that’s how we ended up with the Compromise. And, certainly, had we taken the scenic route and spent a few more weeks on the thing, it all could have turned out differently.

Different? Yes. Better? Maybe not.

In fact, maybe it would help if I drew a diagram.

All we can say for sure is that we’re stuck with the Compromise we’ve got. There is no going back. There is no undo button.

At the very least, we didn’t have to sit in that Christmas traffic.

And thus, the Compromise came into place, and with it, our Collective Amnesia. We all agreed to forget that the last four years ever happened.

December 31 2020 was followed by January 1 2016.

At least, that’s how it went here.

The rest of the world thought we were bananas — and probably rightfully so. Even before we ironed out the details, they were begging us to reconsider. The premise alone of Collective Amnesia, that a whole people could choose forgetting, frightened the hell out of them. They tried to talk us down off our ledge but we had come too far to give up the view. They even threatened us, claiming that they would leave us in the past of our own making, a pariah state four years behind in a race we could never win. Of course, as a country, we had become quite accustomed to being pariahs. Further, the American false sense of faultlessness is best reinforced when its faults are plainly pointed out. When they showed us, first in calm and measured tones but gradually with anger echoing in the gaps between their words, how wrong we were, we became more convinced we were right.

It was the very definition of American exceptionalism.

We weren’t entirely alone. A few other countries tagged along for their own reasons, be it a false sense of kinship (Panama), arms money (Pakistan, Mongolia) or bribery (Greece). Oh, the Cubans came along, too, but only because they imagined they would feel very alone in the future with us in the past. After decades of mutual animosity and playful name calling, the government there didn’t know what they would do without us.

When we go down, we go down together.

Growling and snarling in our general direction, the rest of the lot left us to our misguided devices. To Hell with Hollywood, they said, to Hell with Vanilla Coke, the GMC Denali and the Never Ending Pasta Bowl.

About as painless as potty training a toddler with knives for hands, we took to the task at hand. It wasn’t enough to just say we were all forgetting and then be done with it. We had an open wound. We had ruled out finding a way to heal as too squeamish for our tastes. We had also ruled out pretending it wasn’t there; wounds have a nasty way of itching and this was one that couldn’t safely be scratched. Instead, we were going to undo the damned thing, even if it meant cutting off a limb in the process.

One by one, we unbuilt four years of building: houses, schools, hospitals, malls. If it didn’t exist on the original January 1 2016, it had no business belonging there at all. And, if it had existed on the original January 1 2016 but, in the interceding four years had been taken down, burnt down or otherwise destroyed, we put it right back up again.

All things that had changed hands since 2016 — money, land, Doberman Pinschers, pacemakers — had to be given back to their original owner. Many people only returned things begrudgingly. The lottery winners were especially upset, though the art collectors, the (good) day traders and that one guy who made a few billion dollars selling bitcoin were also pretty peeved.

When we turned back the clock, we also gave people four years of their lives back — where applicable. Forty four was the new forty. Of course, it wasn’t so simple for the dead. It was a bit of a workaround, but, officially speaking, millions of people died on the new January 1 2016. Similarly, very many suddenly large babies were born on that day. Most of them had all the height and intelligence of a four year old, by way of things.

We sent children back four grades in school. Test scores were never higher that first year. It was probably worth it to learn again some long division.

We forgot countless scientific discoveries. We forgot the winners of Super Bowls and Kentucky Derbys that, technically speaking, never really happened. We forgot the abuses of our friends and spouses and welcomed them back into our homes.

These weren’t popular decisions, and before that new January 1, many people left the country on a kind of geographic and temporal exile. On account of four years of malignancy, Americans weren’t widely welcomed in much of the world, but, in small pockets, those who left found refuge. Vibrant communities sprung up in Eritrea and East Timor. Numerous competing governments in exile claim to be the true, year-appropriate, heirs to the American throne. It’s mostly a battle fought on the internet. Nobody knows the human-to-bot ratio or who will win the war. I hear tell you can get some good Texas Toast in the bazaars of Bhutan, though.

All of it — the unbuilding and the rebuilding, the paperwork underpinning the complete backwardizing of the economy, the sudden severance of most international trade — was very costly. And not just financially. As part of the deal, we had to forget the epidemic, all while the virus very much remembered us.

You might think that all of this was very difficult. It was, and still is.

You might question if all of it were really worth it, if the effort paid off. Those are valid questions.

I suppose the common retort would be that, yes, this forgetting has been difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Absurd even. But, the retort might go on, it certainly has been easier, cheaper and less uncomfortable than truly reckoning with what happened in those four years. Not one of us wanted either to look at their neighbor or in the mirror to discover what led to that small little epoch of misery. Better not to wonder. Better not to speculate. Better not to accuse. Better not to find little truths about ourselves. Better not to unwrite the myths. Better not to know we’re hollow. Better not to lose the luster.

Want to find out what would have happened if we hadn’t had the Compromise, if we hadn’t forgotten?

Better not.

I should add that not everyone who wanted to got out in time. A not small group of people were stuck in America, in the past. This created a conundrum for those who had fallen in line and forgotten. What to do with these conscientious objectors? Cracks begin to form around collective amnesia once that guy who lives next door to you or the girl you dated sophomore year in college obstinately proclaims, ‘This isn’t right. We can’t choose ignorance. We can’t choose blindness. We can’t just have a do-over. It’s going to be hard, but we’ve got to figure it out how we got here’.’

Nevermind cracks: that kind of talk causes chasms. Collective amnesia is predicated on

having the whole collective onboard. Dissenters and doubters, the thinking was, would sink the whole thing. A time truther here or there would remind people that they were, effectively, lying to themselves. We had burned all the old calendars, the magazines and the almanacs, but no one felt right about burning people up, too. The fires were bright but the idea wasn’t.

And then bang! Zoom! Zip! Squiggle! Human ingenuity is boundless. Man always finds

away. Thanks to our thumbs and our resolve, man perseveres!

They couldn’t outright get rid of all of us who chose to remember, no, but they could call us crazy. We, by this new way of thinking, were a sad group of lunatics convinced that one or two countries were stuck in the past on account of national inability to do penance for our sins. It does sound crazy doesn’t it? We poor, hapless fools ranting and raving about an executive gone mad, enabled by a cabal of bloodthirsty, plutocratic leeches and double-crossing evangelicals willing to throw away their creed if it meant getting a few judges seats on superior courts; losing the war to win the battle. We simple-minded, stubborn-headed fanatics, preaching about a disease from the future and the need to, at the very least, tie a damned bandana around your face to protect your grandma.

That’s how they disenfranchised us and, finally, secured their Pyrrhic victory for forgetting. For our own safety and well-being, they moved us to homes where we are free to carry on about a world, they say, that only exists between these four walls and in our heads. Here, where I sit now amongst a whole bunch of other grumps who’ve got their memories and not much else, we will do much less harm to the collective conscientious.

They wanted the past, they created the past, they got the past. They forgot the future. It may not be perfect, but it’s a Compromise.