The president is in trouble, Zan realizes, watching the news in the airport lobby. He thinks he’s who he thinks he is; he doesn’t understand that, in political terms, he’s who the public thinks he is or he’s no one. This was the great test, whether there was a song the country could sing in common. Instead, more than ever it’s a country of many songs all of them noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel of not just melodies that no one shares but memory; and as Babel fractured language into thousands, the country is the sum total of a memory fractured into millions, not one of them a memory of the country as it actually has ever existed.