We Have Never Resolved the Fight Over What This Country Is Meant to Be
An afternoon at Gettysburg, for some perspective.
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA—I had to go somewhere to get the noise out of my head. The ads and the punditry and everything else about the presidential election had taken on the whiteout drone of a car stuck in the mud and spinning its wheels. I was exhausted by trying to keep up with the narratives that were being spun out to try and keep the eyes on the tube and the fingers clicking on the keyboard. I was fed to the gills with people trying to divine the state of things by their own personal omens.
Why is Donald Trump in Minnesota? Why is Hillary Rodham Clinton spending so much time in Pennsylvania? The endless, futile speculation in this regard amounted to trying to "call" Florida based on the reading of goat entrails or the flight of a flock of birds. It made my head hurt. I needed some time in the country. So I drove west from Philadelphia to this place now rustling with fallen leaves, where the monuments stand clear in the autumn air.
(Were I Peggy Noonan, I might point out that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago won the lawn-sign brawl in a walkover along Route 30 West. This did not just include the formal signs dispatched from the campaign, either. I saw dozens of homemade signs, paint on slabs of plywood, hanging from the sides of small businesses, outside body shops and gun stores. From this we can conclude only that Trump likely would be elected to the Lancaster County Board of Supervisors.)
I spent my time here in the middle of Cemetery Ridge, at the spot where Pickett's Charge came over the wall, and where the assault was repulsed by the Army of the Potomac and the battle won. It is a quiet, crowded place. People flock to this place on the battlefield but they make no noise, no fuss. Amateur military historians pore over maps and dispute in low voices why certain troops were placed in certain positions. No voices are raised. The conversation is drowned out by the sound of the leaves stirring around on the ground around the monuments—around the spot where Armistead fell, after getting over the wall, and where Cushing fired his last remaining cannon before someone shot him in the mouth, and along the low stone wall behind which Pennsylvania men threw back the invaders who had dared come onto their fields and farms.
Eventually, though, people look up and they fall silent. They look out on the long, broad expanse over which Robert E. Lee sent the better portion of his army to its destruction. They look out over the fields and, almost as one, they shake their heads in wonderment at the magnitude of the mistake and the magnitude of the sacrifice that was its inevitable consequence.
No, pundits. This is not as divided as the country ever has been. It is as noisy as the country ever has been, and it probably is as grumpy as the country ever has been, although I'll still take the years between 1965 and 1972 in a fair fight. But we are engaging ourselves over trivia because we don't want to admit to ourselves that the issues that prompted the bloodshed on this ridge are still with us today, regardless of whether or not John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee. We have never resolved the fight over what the country is, what the country is meant to be, and who we will allow to participate fully in the freedom that we so righteously proclaim.
There is talk of open secession now, and of the power of men in the government to keep it from operating fully for the general good. And there is race, because there always is race. There was race on this slope and there will be race at the polling places on Tuesday. Those long lines are not evidence of the indomitability of the African-American voter. They are testimony to the fact that the forces that fell back across the fields from this ridge never really gave up the fight, that they still will look for any opening, any weakness in the defenses, and pour through them again.
So, yes, we are a divided country. We don't need numbers and metrics to tell us that. We have a candidate unprecedented in his ability to embody unreasoning dread, and another candidate unprecedented in her ability to inspire unreasoning anger. But in this quiet, rustling place in the middle of the ridge, the contentious public issues of this contentious campaign look small and very far away, like the line of trees in which the Virginians formed for their suicidal charge in support of maintaining human slavery.
It is the real issues, the unresolved nature of American freedom, that live on here, and the knowledge that it is on a place like this ridge that a divided country can end up. The TV drones have sought them out and given them a platform, the people who will look into the camera and talk blithely about civil war as if they really know what that means. Come to the ridge, boyos. Look out over the field, now golden in the autumn sun, and talk to me about that.
Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.
