‘The Smash-Up,’ by Ali Benjamin: An Excerpt

What happened?

Everyone asked the question, had been asking since the election. They asked while watching the news, that storm of headlines, jump-cut footage of marches and speeches and hand-sharpied cardboard, an endless, swirling blizzard—a siege, really—of protests and counterprotests, action and reaction, people screaming at one another in the street, neighbor versus neighbor, friend versus friend. (Or too often: friends no more. We were in new territory. People had their limits.)

What happened? Reporters asked in small-town diners over $7.50 lunch specials, BLTs cut into neat wedges and Heinz bottles perched like microphones atop scratched Formica tables.

What happened? People asked one another in church basements, community centers, gyms, coffee shops, living rooms where they came together to weep, process, scrawl on placards, plan the revolution.

What happened? Parents snapped off NPR mid-story, not wanting to answer questions from the backseat. College students organized walkouts, staged sit-ins, blocked freeways. A giant inflatable chicken appeared behind the White House lawn, some sort of protest that no one entirely understood. Everything was some sort of protest now.

[ Return to the column on “The Smash-Up.” ]

What happened what happened what happened what

Everyone had their answers, and as is generally the case in these situations, everyone’s version of the story was a little different. It was impossible, it was inevitable, it was surreal, it was unreal, it was scandal, sea change, enthralling, a coup. It was some bad sort of smash-up: just the right-or-wrong elements at just the right-or- wrong time: anger and alienation, misinformation and disinformation, resentment and rage, hucksters and hackers, bots and Nazis (literal Nazis! As if they hadn’t been the unequivocal villains in every film for the last half century! For heaven’s sake, hadn’t these people ever even seen Indiana Jones?). It was all of these things, it was none of these things, it made no goddamned sense, that’s the point, and the only thing any of us knew for sure was this: on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the year of our lord two thousand and sixteen, our nation—and with it the world we’d known—had turned upside down.

Once, a lifetime ago it seems now, I interviewed a geologist. This was in the Before—before the world smashed to pieces, back when we could count on tomorrow unfolding more or less like it had today, which of course was more or less like yesterday and all the days before that. Find something interesting, my editor had told me. He’d said it vaguely, with a wave of his hand. Make geology relevant.