Child emotions and adult pain

Philip Roth’s pseudo-ego Nathan Zuckerman kan zich niet meer druk maken om de politiek. “I’ve served my tour as exasperated liberal and indignant citizen.” Na zich jaren in afsluiting te hebben gewijd aan zijn schrijverschap, keert Zuckerman terug naar de stad en verwondert zich over de felheid waarmee een jong stel zich opwindt over de herverkiezing van jolige buikspreekpop Bush. Zuckerman schetst zijn democratisch verleden waarin de kiezer het meermalen klaarspeelde om de bad guy in het zadel te helpen:

“I have been an avid voter al my life, one who’d never pulled a Republican lever for any office on any ballot. I had campaigned for Stevenson as a college student and had my juvenile expectations dismantled when Eisenhower trounced him, first in ’52 and then again in ’56; and I could not believe what I saw when a creature so rooted in his ruthless pathology, so transparently fraudulent fraudulent and malicious as Nixon, defeated Humphrey in ’68, and when, in the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a “great communicator” no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide. And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that is was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen’s naiveté? I’d hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan policitcs, but now, havind lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child -the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without America’s ever again being absorbed in me.”*

*Exit Ghost, Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, London 2007