The state of the union is...

On the lies he tells, and the truths we must repeat to one another

The rescue of Joshua Glover

Last night, Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress. It wasn’t a State of the Union, because I guess there are rules about what is and isn’t a State of the Union. It’s funny that we’re still pedantic about that and not, say, whether unelected billionaires and teenage computer goons should be allowed to hacksaw Headstart and Ebola funding, but I digress.

I watched the not-State of the Union while eating a cherry pączki. That’s what you do in Milwaukee and Detroit and Chicago and Buffalo the day before Lent. We have Rust Belt Poles to thank for that tradition, people who taught us that life is often hard but that there are joys to be had. If you want to be cynical, you could say that pączki are just jelly donuts, but I buy a six pack every year because I am raising two Milwaukeeans and I want my kids to develop pleasantly anachronistic memories of their hometown. Be proud, kids, I say through the medium of filled pastries. You live in an imperfect place, but it’s decent at its core.

That’s basically the point of Presidential Addresses, I suppose. An American patriarch (always a patriarch, a fact that should bring out more pitchforks and fewer shrugs) stands in front of the country to say, essentially, that we should be proud to be from here, but only if we follow our leader’s plans for us. Trump’s has always opted for a less honest, more twisted variation on the form, and last night was no exception. He lied a lot. He told a story about a country in which only some of us belong. He posited himself as the solution to all problems. I will not be analyzing his speech. You probably skipped it, but you know the deal. Others will no doubt opine as to what bolder steps the Democrats could have done to raise a fuss. I’ve shared my thoughts on that matter already.

There is no formal purpose behind a Presidential Address to Congress. There is no legislation officially considered, no bills becoming laws. The whole affairs rests on the conceit that pageantry and storytelling matters, that a country benefits from having its leader tell us where we have been and where we should go.

There’s a lot that I don’t love about the American Presidency, and a million times more things that disgust me about this particular American President, but I’m not against storytelling. It’s just that I prefer a different style than that practiced by Trump and Vance— non-fiction rather than fiction, open-hearted rather than craven, hope-giving rather than fear-mongering.

I tell plenty of stories as a writer, but far more as a father. The new administration has me working overtime as a storyteller. My eight-year-old and twelve-year-old are (currently at least) cocooned by a certain level of privilege, but like all of us, they live an interdependent life. They have friends whose families don’t have papers, friends who have transitioned or hope to do so soon, and many, many friends and family members holding on thanks to government programs. They know that their parents’ personal and professional lives connect them to thousands who are scared or under attack and, as such, that we too are scared and under attack. They live on a street where a hell of a lot of people were struggling long before Trump, but for whom life will likely get much tougher. They came of age in a global plague, for God’s sake. You don’t have to tell them that none of us are free until we are all free, but they still want assurance that we can get there.

My kids ask questions, so as their parents we do our best to answer. Our household is the site of hundreds of mini States of the Union.

The other morning, my daughter asked a question about Trump but then got distracted and asked a different one, about slavery. “We learned about Harriet Tubman,” she told me proudly. Thank God Black History Month still exists, I thought. My daughter, who shares a name with Ida B. Wells, has a good friend named Harriet. Thank God for schools that hear those names and still say “there are some heroes with those names.”

My Ida Jane asked me for more stories “about people like Harriet Tubman.” I pulled up a map and showed her the Levi Coffin house in Richmond, Indiana, a key Underground Railroad depot. “The Coffins were Quakers,” I told her. “like us.” I continued, dorkily but earnestly, as is my parental duty. “They were mad that our country was being cruel, so they asked themselves what they could do to make it more loving. Do you think that’s an important question to always ask ourselves?”

She answered affirmatively but perfunctorily. She wanted more stories. I asked her if she knows the spot where we sometimes ride our bikes. It’s at the top of a hill overlooking downtown. She knows that place well. It’s a gorgeous view. “So that’s Booth and Glover Streets,” I mentioned. “Do you know who Booth and Glover were?”

Again, what an immensely cornball move on my part, a cheap way to get implicit permission to play the part of History Dad. Bless her for humoring me.

“Who were they?”

“So Joshua Glover was a Black man who fled slavery on the Underground Railroad. He came up to Wisconsin and worked in a sawmill in Racine. Life wasn’t perfect, but he made a lot of friends here— White and Black— because back then this was an area where lots of people hated slavery and wanted Black and White people to be able to live together. The problem was, there was a terrible law that said that even when slaves escaped, they could be arrested and sent back down South again. So one day, Joshua Glover was caught and thrown in jail around Cathedral Square. The plan was to keep him there until they could force him back to Missouri. But before they could do that, a guy named Sherman Booth, who ran the newspaper in town, heard what had happened. He rode his horse all around, telling everybody about Joshua. Soon a huge group ran to the jail together, broke in, and helped him escape.”

Ida liked that story. I did too. I loved that the abolitionists and the Underground Railroad conductors had no reason to believe that our country would ever actually outlaw slavery and yet the built and loved and fought as if it could be true. I loved that, as much as the Glover and Booth story was about radical politics, it was even more about friendship and community and the kind of Milwaukee that existed back when it was full of unions and socialists meeting in beer halls and neighborhood benevolent organizations. I told Ida Jane that another one of the Milwaukee radicals, Margarethe Schurz, founded America’s first kindergarten. Some good deeds beget other good deeds. Some communities seed revolutions.

There is never just one story. There’s another intersection in Milwaukee with a decent view of downtown. It’s over on the South Side, where the Sixteenth Street viaduct reaches Canal Street. Back in 1967, a mob of working class Whites attacked a crowd of mostly Black civil rights marchers. By that point, abolitionist Milwaukee had morphed into the Selma of the North, the kind of place that George Wallace praised for its resistance to integration. If you look around Milwaukee today, you’ll find more evidence of the legacy of 1967 than 1854. Some cruelties beget other cruelties. Some communities don’t always live up to the promise of the term.

There’s no way to tell the American story without both narratives. We will always be the country that proclaimed justice for all and then winked. We will always be the land of life, liberty and glaring asterisks, but also the land where generations of activists have overflowed with enough love and rage to ask “but what if, for the first time ever, we actually meant it?”

We need storytelling right now— the kind that is imaginative and true rather than fantastical and naive— because it’s so easy to be rudderless. We flit from headline to headline, poll to poll, outrage to outrage. We struggle to discern when to pay attention and when to protect from overwhelm. We know that there are things to do, but most days they feel quixotic. We lose ourselves so easily. It’s not our fault— these are overwhelming times— but repeating that fact doesn’t make it any easier.

To keep our bearings, we must tell a story of an America which has always contained both Empire and resistance to Empire. We must tell of the concrete and the roses. We must tell of a nation that birthed Nathan Bedford Forrest and Ella Baker, Birth of a Nation and The Fire This Time, Anita Bryant and Paris is Burning, Sheriff Joe and a million quinceañeras where the dance floors are packed for Como La Flor. We have to tell about how this moment is dark, but it is not our first.

We have to remind ourselves that ours is a nation of three-fifths compromises and suffrage only for white men. It is a country of robber barons and genocide. It is a nation of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. It is a nation where we have never all been free.

We tell those stories not as an act of puffed up radical nihilism, but in service of a more profound truth. We are not currently asked to do anything that our ancestors haven’t done before. We are the nation of many horrors, but also millions of acts of resistance to horrors.

Last night’s address wasn’t technically a state of the union, but it was one more chance for Trump to lay out a story of a country whose hearts are small and shriveled.

But if he gets to tell his stories, than so do we.

You know damn well that the state of the union isn’t strong.

The state of the union is cruel, which means that we must be more caring than ever.

The state of the union is teetering, which means that we must both block and build at the same time.

The state of the union breaks our hearts, which means that we must love each other even harder.

The state of the union has us questioning our own mettle, which is why we must remember that we are not the first who’ve been asked to be brave.

The state of the union is, as it has always been, unwritten.

The state of the union is, as always, what we make it.

End notes:

-This round of Barnraisers classes (on building community) have been a gift, but we’ve pretty much come to the end of the road. There’s still a few hours to register for Friday’s class, but if that’s not in the cards (or if you read this after Wednesday afternoon, the 5th), I highly encourage you to sign up for the interest list. New classes will be announced soon.

-This has been a busy month for me— what with balancing the largest classes I’ve ever offered and a growing audience for these essays with dad and community commitments. I am so grateful for you all and also I owe many of you emails. That’s one of my big goals now that classes are winding down.

-I’ve still got some (free!) stickers to send (read this essay first for context).

-Sometimes my songs of the week are particularly on the nose, but there’s a time and season for that, I think. Here’s “State of the Union” by Richard Shindell.

The complete Song of the Week playlists (well, partially complete— perhaps today I’ll finally update them) are on Apple Music and Spotify.