Welcome to Pottersville

Back at the dawn of this century, writer Gary Kamiya penned one of the most arresting meditations on America I know. 

It was hard to tell just how tongue-in-cheek “All hail Pottersville!” was. The setting of George Bailey’s nightmare vision in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Pottersville is the “demonic foil” to bucolic Bedford Falls: “a kind of combo pack of Sodom, Gomorrah, Times Square in 1972, Tokyo’s hostess district, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast ca. 1884 and one of those demon-infested burgs dimly visible in the background of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.” 

But Pottersville looks a lot more exciting than Bedford Falls. Moreover, it’s far closer to the twenty-first century that Americans know and love than its alternative. Everyone reading this would be climbing the walls of Bedford Falls. Pottersville might be wicked and dangerous, but it’s fun! 

Much like America.

True, the name is superficially offensive. “’Pottersville’ does reek of Donald Trump-like vulgarity,” Kamiya pointed out, “but is that such a bad thing? Being named after a ruthless captain of industry casts a long, Ayn Randian shadow over a city, giving tacit permission to its inhabitants to pursue their pleasures in the enveloping moral darkness.”

I thought of Kamiya’s piece on that November night in 2016, stunned like many of you that the country of the 1st Amendment, “with malice toward none,” Omaha Beach, the Berlin Airlift, and Jonas Salk, could commit such an absurd and irresponsible act. I thought of it again over the past week, as the details of the latest indictment rolled out.

On Friday, Ruth Marcus informed us that it’s “a somber, sobering moment for the country. We have never been to this place before.” In conversation with Marcus, David Brooks added:

I don’t see those as documents. Those are human beings. Those are American lives. Those are people who are helping the United States around the world who are put at risk. Those are American soldiers and Marines and airmen and seamen who are put at risk. And so the lack of reverence, lack of sense of responsibility for the people who were serving under his command is just so offensive.

He’s right of course. From what we know, Trump kept these documents not because he’s engaged in espionage, or is selling them, or even because, Ahab-like, he fondles them bitterly as he stalks the halls of Mar-a-Lago at night, but just so he could show off. On-brand for him, we might say.

But is a lack of reverence and responsibility really that off-brand for we-the-people these days? I would not be surprised if Lincoln’s statue on the mall can’t be heard muttering, “I love you, but you are not serious people,” in the dead of night, Succession-style, as he gazes out on the nation he somehow preserved.

To take just one example: In the space of twelve days in 1972, a single bombing operation in the Vietnam War dropped more than 20,000 tons of ordnance, killing somewhere around 1,624 civilians, and sacrificing the lives of at least 43 American crewmen. Not to win the war. The president at the time had known for at least five years that the war was lost. The operation was just to hurry along stalled negotiations. 

We did this, let it be noted, over Christmas.

Serious people? Reverence and responsibility? Or wicked and dangerous?

A couple years ago political scientist Francis Fukuyama reflected: “At the end of Trump’s term, what I’ve learned is that I really don’t understand America well at all.”

Sometimes I agree. At those moments, I blame America for not living up to my hopes for it. But maybe the problem is me. The evidence has been there all along, from Cotton Mather to the slave auctions to Las Vegas to micro-dosing to the PGA. Has it not? 

It’s not all bad of course. We have our ideals. Biden’s 2024 budget includes $211 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities (approximately .003% of the whole, by my estimation). 

Even Pottersville had a public library, after all.