![]() Just before she died, her parents phoned me from her bedside so I could say a few words to her. We’d been to Texas together, once we went to the rodeo and a megachurch and fired AR-15s at a shooting range. Four years ago, my closest friend died in a hospital in Texas, while I sat five thousand miles away in London, doing nothing. Of course it was: I’d spent half the night reading about it, watching videos of cops firing Tasers and pepper spray at the frantic parents who tried to rush into the school and save their children, and when I tried to sleep there was a lump growing in my belly and I couldn’t. My dream of the Texas hospital was about the Uvalde massacre. A perfect knowledge of the facts is not enough it needs to be turned into a parable, a little story. Dreams draw together things that seem to have the same shape, or that echo each other in a way the daytime mind can’t quite explain. But in dreams, the experiences of the last day are integrated into the anxieties that have ruled your entire life, sewn tight into the fabric of your neurotic little mind. Waking life is just a succession of events-five dead, three dead, twelve dead-loosely held together by the vague frenzy of conscious thought. The world by itself does not make sense, and this is why we dream. But here, on a rooftop, firing at a rate of 45 rounds per minute directly into the crowd, is the 21st century. In a way, this country is very, very old. ![]() Americans are supposed to be hooked up to a constant drip feed of digitized distraction, but despite Netflix and TikTok they’ll still reliably line the streets just to watch someone take a very slow walk while playing the French horn. In Europe, we still have the occasional parade, but it’s usually under the aegis of the trade-union movement or the Catholic Church, and both institutions are dying. Teenage marching bands solemnly parping their trumpets, and all those heavy outfits shakos, aiguillettes, like a Napoleonic battalion wandering unstuck in time. Towns full of prosperous burghers with their strong civic values Yankee Doodle and fireworks, kosher hot dogs, parades. Here is the cheerful eighteenth-century masquerade of America: 1776 and the Fourth of July. ![]() The spree in Highland Park was the one that caught everyone’s attention that day, and not just because it was the deadliest. Six weeks later, on the Fourth of July, thirteen people were shot in New York, six people were shot in Kansas City, six people were shot in Richmond, five people were shot in Sacramento, two people were shot in Philadelphia and in Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, someone climbed to the roof of a building during an Independence Day parade and opened fire. Ten days previously, someone had walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and murdered a security guard and nine customers, most of them elderly. The previous day, someone had walked into a school in Uvalde, Texas and murdered nineteen children, along with two teachers, while the police stood around outside and did nothing. I sat quietly in my chair and tried not to look the American in the eyes until I woke up in bed. I believe in 1776 and the Fourth of July.” That was enough. Only when I was done did he come up to me, close, very close, and growl, “Listen pal. ![]() I was practically begging him to punch me in the face, but he just sat through my tirade, perfectly impassive. I told him that he was fat and probably illiterate, that his clothes were made of plastic and didn’t fit, and that nobody would remember him when he died. Another man was waiting with me, and in my desperation I picked a fight with him. Someone I knew was in there, and she was dying, but there was nothing I could do except sit in the air-conditioned waiting room as doctors and nurses ran around in panic behind plate glass and the traffic roared outside. This Texas was only freeways and hospitals, and I was at a hospital. Every so often-near a big interchange, usually-there would be a huge slab of blue glass, a forty-story building: a hospital. From one horizon to the other, the entire flat landscape was a mess of tangled freeways forty-lane, fifty-lane screaming metal in the sunshine, bright green fringes of grass. ![]()
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