As we lay dying: terminal illness as a national metaphor

Earl Shorris is dying. A cancer survivor, he endures the near failure of organs, shuffling among hospitals and a kaleidescope of attending doctors. All the while he muses about death and suffering, by turns elegaic and rhapsodic.

His essay, "American Vespers: The ebbing of the body politic", featured in Harper's Dec. 2011 issue, is a memoir in diptych; a view of terminal illness as an individual and as a metaphor for a waning nation. What a compelling read for the end of a troubled 2011.

The pivotal passage between both frames reads: "I lie alongside my country, patriot of my body and my home, dying from an enemy within. Everything had come for me as it had come for America. How similarly we failed!"

For Earl Shorris, Paul Valéry stands at the terminus of a string of writers known as "decadent"--those who criticized the French middle class for their materialism made possible by the output the Industrial Revolution. The decadents considered the national decline as a loss of vitality. Though Shorris does not state this specifically, their art making emphasized passion and beauty in abundance--proportional to the excess of accumilating products.

Because of the bourgeois fixation on accumilation, decadents saw a nation in decline; a loss of vitality. Though Shorris does not state this specifically, their art making emphasized passion and beauty in abundance--a revolt proportional to the excess of middle class materialism.

A nation endures only so much consumption before illness sets in. In Shorris's view, Ronald Reagan introduced the pathogen--a deficiency of ethics--that now afflicts the United States. To emphasize the point by contrast, Shorris refers to Scottish Enlightenment thinker Frances Hutcheson, who argued that the greatest good is the happiness of others. The heirs of Reagan's ethics legacy--Kristol, Cheney, Bush, Podhoretz, Falwell, Strauss and Bloom--said otherwise through their policy decisions.

The writer takes certain liberties interpreting the impact of Ronald Reagan's candidacy and presidency. There is the first speech Reagan gave after wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination in Aug. 1980. At a county fair in Mississippi, not far from where three civil rights workers were slain in 1964, Reagan asserted "states' rights" in an address to a Southern audience--considered at best an insensitive gesture toward the victims of intolerance. "States rights" is well known among Southerners as a polite reference to turning back the clock on civil rights and racial integration. Additionally, Shorris recalls the time Reagan met with the Republican black caucus and could not recall the name of a single member of the group.

The infirmity that now sickens this nation sprouted without being recognized. "The cell that multiplies, the killing thing," Shorris writes, "lies beneath the observable world." Indeed, the pestilent agent lies out of sight because we, as a nation, are far more complicit than we are capable of acknowledging.

With the ascendancy of a figure like Reagan or George Walker Bush, one might point out that such figures simply reflect a prevailing quality or character already at work within a nation's citizenry.

A Reagan or Bush manifests simply because enough of us--void of curiosity, brazen and shadow projecting louts--have summoned such leaders.

In a medical case such as ours the undeniable message is, "Sick nation, heal thyself."