Yair Lapid: American Loneliness - The Atlantic

Driving on I-79 south from Pittsburgh toward Charlottesville, I started composing this birthday card in my head—a love letter to America on its 250th birthday. The hills of Pennsylvania were blanketed in glittering white snow from which bare-armed trees rose like the locals: lean, weathered, lined and stained like the earth. In a frozen sales lot beside the road, 50 John Deere tractors stood in formation, their booms raised toward the sky like eaglets waiting to be fed. At the crest of one hill, someone had planted an old shipping container painted with large letters: TRUMP. I drew closer, and more words appeared: GUNS. LIFE. JESUS. LOVE.<br>America is like a modern painting that looks different up close than from a distance. As both the prime minister and opposition leader of Israel, I worked directly with two American presidents and got to know two others. As the finance minister and foreign minister, I dealt with America’s financial and technology sectors. And in my youth, I spent a brief, unsuccessful period in Hollywood—the most memorable things from that chapter being a strange breakfast with Richard Gere and meetings with German bankers. But in between, I went to meet the real America.<br>For more than 35 years, at least twice a year, I have picked up a car somewhere in America and spent a few days on the road. It is my Vipassana, my way of disconnecting and reconnecting. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been made on those roads. My memories have blurred with the years, but I have probably visited 40 states. I have never made it to Alaska or Hawaii, and for some reason missed both Dakotas—but will get there someday. I know that the best onion rings in America are at the Crystal Beer Parlor in Savannah, Georgia; that the best gas-station coffee is found at the Love’s chain; and that the pharmacy in Walmart is always to the left of the registers. Once I drove toward what looked like a great gray mountain range blocking my way to Buffalo, New York, only to realize as I drew closer that it was a winter-weather front rearing above the highway, clouds swollen with hard hailstones. In November 1995, I sat on a hard bed in a Motel 6 in New Mexico and watched a television announcer report the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. A Santa Ana wind carrying sparks of burning brush once bore down on me in California.<br>The journeys have taken me down highways and back roads. I have had short conversations, meaningless conversations, strange conversations, and long conversations that scored something into my soul. I always listen to music. In the beginning it was almost exclusively Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash, but over the years I discovered Jason Isbell, Zach Bryan, Ray LaMontagne—the poets of asphalt and the wounded heart of rural America. Most of the time, I have tried to honor the commandment of the French philosopher Simone Weil, who said that the most generous thing a person can do is truly listen.<br>And what I’ve learned is that the standard account of the current era is entirely wrong. The conventional wisdom is that the United States is violent, dispirited, trapped inside an identity politics of its own making—conspiracy theories, algorithms, incel forums, pornography, immigrant hatred in the land of immigrants, social networks that are a pathetic imitation of human society. The world has been turned upside down: Conservatives now want to change everything, while progressives want everything to go back to the way it was. Americans went looking for the light and were caught in the selva oscura, Dante’s dark wood.<br>Watch: American democracy, 250 years later<br>Everything has already been said about this dystopian portrait, except perhaps one thing: It is not true. The eulogies for America are not insight; they are more closely akin to malicious gossip. Perhaps it is easier to see this from the outside. America is not the pale boy who pulls the hood over his disheveled hair and then opens fire in a schoolyard. America is all of the other children. The ones who shield smaller kids with their own body, the ones who block the classroom door at the risk of their life, the ones who stand, embracing, at a funeral, talking about a new beginning.<br>The media world in which you live plays on an endless loop the story of a toxic and corrupt America—but is that also your immediate experience? Is that how the people you know, the people you work with, behave? It does not describe Bob and Earl, who fixed my flat tire in Tucson and refused to take money. Or the oiled-skin bodybuilder at Venice Beach who cheerfully taught me tricep exercises. In the real world, do you actually know any liberals who support ISIS? Have you ever actually met a conservative with a Hitler poster in his basement? Even the claim that families are being torn apart by political polarization—how anchored is it in the reality of your own life?<br>And to the extent dissension is visible, the intensity...