These Dreams of You

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The campaign is shambolic, a moving pandemonium. More than anything it resembles an act of penance, the lashed slog from one station of the cross to the next; when he unconsciously touches the heads of poor children, brushes their cheeks with a finger, it’s more priestly than political. Jasmine can’t imagine how, if he manages to get elected, he’ll survive the job — not because he isn’t tough enough, certainly not because he isn’t committed enough, but because he’s altogether too committed, because he gives altogether too much, beyond what any sane self can stand or give. Retreating to the edges of staff meetings where he lies on a couch saying nothing as some point of strategy is hashed over, he ends arguments with decisions so succinct and raging (“Indiana is essential, we need to not just win there but crush”) that Jasmine can only be mystified by the method and math of democrazy that she’s come to spell with a z.

Wild and frenzied from kansan desolations that no foreigner can imagine short of the moon, where white college students chase the bus and train just to call to him the goodbyes that will be unbearable to remember in three months, to indianan victories not crushing enough, to oregonian defeats that leave him precarious on the edge of political oblivion, little of it seems to have bearing on what he speaks of to privileged and working-class alike: the rats of the black tenements and the self-killing grounds of Indian reservations, delano daughters with hands stained by the vineyards on which they barely subsist and delta sons with bodies misshapen by hunger. This is prosperity, he bays at them beneath montana nights, calculated as much by what’s polluted, what’s killed, what’s secured and incarcerated, but never by a child’s delight, a poem’s spell, the immutable power of a kept promise. It’s a prosperity that measures everything that means nothing and nothing that means everything. It tells all of us, he concludes to the crowds, everything about our country except why it’s ours.