American Dissonance
The doctrine that defines life in the USA.
When I became aware of the murder of Alex Pretti, I was lounging in a humongous resort pool, sipping a watered down tropical drink I can’t remember the name of.
Back home in suburban Maryland, temperatures were below freezing, and my driveway was sitting untouched under a layer of ice. Yet, here I was in tropical paradise: the weather a balmy 84 degrees, a soundtrack of early-aughts dance hits rhythmically thumping in the background, attempting to hijack spotty resort wi-fi to glean the facts surrounding the killing of an innocent person by jackbooted thugs in a frozen American city.
The dissonance was real.
In a way, the separation of my reality in that moment—where my corporal body lay next to white sand beaches and cerulean water—and the reality of those struggling under an unlawful occupation in subzero temperatures thousands of miles away felt strangely emblematic of America as a whole: the fractured mind-fuck that it is to be a United States citizen in this particular historical moment.
We go about our lives pretending things are “normal,” but of course they are not. From my perspective, the American experiment isn’t just on the verge of failure, it has already broken. We have lost, forgoing compassion for weaponized patriotism. There are no consequences for the evil people who are in power and there never will be. Capitalism has won and left a broken society in the wake of its victory.
Yet, still, I admire those who have the fortitude and enough faith in this country’s ostensible mission statement to resist despite the odds.
As I read about the circumstances of Pretti’s murder—the sheer brutality of it, how public it all was, how evil—I felt a pit in my stomach. I struggled to reconcile my hedonistic, carefree vacation surroundings—the never-ending flow of fruit juice and rum, the gluttonous all-you-can-eat buffets—with the stream of information I couldn’t stop force-feeding into my eyeballs. I wanted to scream at everyone around me: wake up, you heathens! Who cares about the neverending chocolate buffet!! People are being murdered in the streets!
But, of course, I didn’t do that. Instead, I sulked, bottling up my emotions, opting instead to doom-scroll in paradise.
The obvious, eye-rolling platitude is that America is, of course, a land of contrasts. It always has been. But, over the past decade (probably longer) it’s clear that our disagreements as a people can no longer be characterized by polite handwaving and “both sides have problems” rhetoric. To be in America is to live in dissonance: to trudge through the banal normalities of daily life (work, school, kids, dirty dishes) and the extreme authoritarian regime that is hellbent on punishing all those who disagree with it.
I think of the dissonance of the tactical athleisure wearing Dad who waves a “Don’t Tread on Me flag” from the back of his Ford 150 while simultaneoulsy scolding his fellow Americans for not submitting to the ghouls invading their communities and rounding up their neighbors.
I think of the dissonance of being told my entire life that the consequence of our constitutional second amendment gun ownership right is that we need to accept a steady stream of mass shootings, but that it was beyond the pale for Alex Pretti to have a legal, registered firearm.
I think of the dissonance of an entire political movement enshrining itself with the cross only to have no interest in the teachings of the messiah represented by that same cross.
I think of the dissonance of a regime that claims to be pro-life only to have no actual desire to preserve human life in any way.
As the sun rose the morning after Pretti’s death, light just beginning to rise over turquoise waters—as breakfast buffets steamed with carafes stuffed with bacon and sausage to satiate an insatiable stream of guests—I struggled to fully grasp the dissonance between my reality and actual reality thousands of miles away, a gulf that seemed as infinite as the horizon that stretched before me.
With a wry, ironic smirk: I thought: is there anything more American than this?
