A review of forgotten sincerity

I had forgotten that, of course, Kate McKinnon singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as the cold open for Saturday Night Live, the week after Trump won the first time, was, also, a tribute to Leonard Cohen, who had just died. Leonard Cohen has been dead for a while, now, long enough that it doesn’t surprise me to hear it. That means that I don’t really remember that moment when his decease was still a shockingly novel fact. I can, now, still remember him being alive; what I can’t remember, now, was the surprise of suddenly, one day, realizing that he wasn’t.

The fact that it was still fresh that week, still new, and could still hurt is part of what warranted the otherwise startling strangeness of that choice (especially given Lorne Michaels’ grotesque Trump-curiousness): to totally eschew jokes or bits and just do that brutally sincere and mournful song. You could say, if you needed to, that it wasn’t really about Trump, and how it felt that he had won; you could say that it was about Leonard Cohen (even it really was, obviously, about Trump winning the presidency, and how that felt). But the warrant is useful. Even now, if I find it incredibly moving, I could say, if I needed to, that Kate McKinnon’s performance of a transcendently beautiful song was, and is, transcendently beautiful, and that I was moved in the way that song, well-performed, always will move me. It was and it is, and I was and always will be.

Anyway, it’s so easy to forget what a strange thing that sincerity was, in 2016: for Saturday Night Live to open with Kate McKinnon just playing that song, dressed as Hillary Clinton, but also, very specifically, as not HRC, as Kate McKinnon who had been playing Hillary Clinton, but was now playing Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, on the piano. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen now and it hasn’t. That depth of feeling and vulnerability, and he need to express it because you know that “everyone is feeling it,” is, now, out of place. You can hate that Trump is president, loathe him and what he’s doing, and feel real fear about the future, and about the people who will be hurt and who will die because he is president. I do. Many of us do. But it’s not mourning, anymore, because it’s too familiar to be a surprise. That makes it all the more strange to revisit a moment when that performance could feel like it crystalized something we hadn’t found a way to articulate, yet. In that moment, I think, a lot of people saw something strange and immediately recognized exactly what it was and what it was saying; in that moment, a lot of people had a good, solid cathartic cry about what they were just starting to realize they needed to grieve. I don’t remember, but I probably did; I cry easily, sometimes. A nation that will elect Donald Trump even one time has not really been redeemable for a long time, but that doesn’t make it hurt less the moment you realize it.

I don’t want to speak for other people, mind you. I also don’t want to presume that Saturday Night Live speaks for other people. If there was a time when that show did crystalize a kind of boomer consciousness of youth rebellion, it spent most of its fifty years functioning as a kind of weekly vessel into which almost anything from the zeitgeist could and would be poured, later to be available to be selectively recovered and remembered as something significant and meaningfully “of the moment,” though almost always a retroactive gesture. Saturday Night Live just made a lot of stuff—a lot of it bad to mediocre, and rightly forgotten—but with a large enough denominator, the ratio of hit/fail starts to almost accidentally produce a few actually interesting things, that can be remembered as really nailing it.

But in 2016, I think it did nail something for a lot of people, that a lot of those people—like me—have probably tended to forget. In my memory, someone else had written the essay articulating what that was, but after spending a few minutes this morning trying and failing to find the article that that particular person had written about it, that had said what she thought it meant (that had convinced me that it did mean that), I discovered that, in fact, it had just been me. At the time, I tweeted this, and though twitter is all so threadbare and link-rotted that it sort of has to be reconstructed, I was surprised to find that I had written these words:

Kate McKinnon’s SNL cold open was powerful because we saw the mask come off. To see a familiar face, and to expect the familiar jokes, and to instead get pain and beauty and fear and grief and hope and sincerity.

We are done with those kinds of joke, now, for a while, forever, I don’t know. But we are done with them now. We expected a joke about HRC. Instead, we saw a grieving queer woman that will wake up in the country this one has been revealed as being, forever. And the more soaring and sincere the song becomes, the clearer it is that she is not doing her HRC impression, that she is being herself. We can still condemn SNL for having Trump host (and seriously, fuck Lorne Michaels). But that performance was Kate Mackinnon, alone, and that song, up to the jarring, clashing, grating “Live from…” line, was Kate Mackinnon doing “Not-SNL,” doing Leonard Cohen instead. And to strip away the mask and reveal another mask, it frees us to find in the words what we need to hear, to see in her what we need to see.

I wouldn’t say all that now, and my reaction would be different, were I to be transported into the shoes of who I was then. Eight years is a long time; I am not the same person (nor are any of the people involved, which is part of it too). But watching that video and reading those words, now, it reminds me of how novel that hurt was, then, and how hard it is now to remember that feeling’s freshness.

This time around, Saturday Night Live went with jokes, like normal: the cast gets up and—ostensibly without artifice or preparation—directly addresses Donald Trump and informs him that they have always been with him, all voted for him, and are ready to totally and completely submit to him. It’s funny, if it is, because we “know,” of course, that it isn’t “true”; we “know” that Saturday Night Live is both parodying what has already become cliched as “obedience in advance” and winking at the Nazi we all “know” they “know” he is. It’s pretty much all choked in these kinds of knowing quotation marks, wreathed in a cloud of obfuscating irony: when they say “Hail Trump” and rat out their three new, woke cast members—and debut their new impression, “Hot Jacked Trump”—the joke is, of course, that it is a joke, that they are saying all the words they are required to say, but don’t mean them. There is something a lot more honest and sincere about an actress wearing props for a role she isn’t playing than when a bunch of actors are dressed-as-themselves, but pretending. In that way, it is a very typical Saturday Night Live bit, in the way that Saturday Night Live is typical of a mode of very cowardly, mainstream comedy: nothing at the center, and nothing to say, just joke about “what if there was.” I bet Trump loved it.

I’ve been a leftist for a long time, radical in my beliefs, at least, and sometimes in my actions, as often as I’ve had the courage and the opportunity to be. There was very little about a hawkish liberal centrist like Clinton that I liked, and if you asked me—at any time since I decided that that was who I was—if America was “good,” I would have said, obviously, no, America is one of the biggest problems the world has. Eight years can be a long time, but even in 2016, I wouldn’t have said that I believed the progressive notion that the arc of history bends towards justice, that things are getting better and—however long we need to wait—that society is gradually moving in the right direction (or that America is the protagonist of that change). That’s more true today than it’s ever been; after watching this country’s full participation in genocide, full-throated, bloodthirsty and unflinching, it’s been hard to even remember what it was like to think that America could be good.

And yet, belief is a funny thing. I don’t believe in God, but the part of me that learned to fear him as a child is buried too deep to remove. Not believing in Him doesn’t shake my fear that life is an illusion, and that after we die, we are dead for all eternity ever after. Yet why would I believe in eternity, if I don’t believe in an eternal God? The fact that I do—that I carry the superstructure of religious belief even into official agnostic unbelief—says a lot about the fossils we carry in our hearts, in the aftermath of our disillusionment. I think the same is probably true of my “belief” that progress is a lie, and that we live in a time of monsters, and that it’s too late, already, for a lot of things. I know what my eyes and mind tell me, and what I’ve read and have come to be convinced of about How The World Works. But I would still desperately like to be proven wrong. I still want to be lied to, by a country that has exhausted its credit, a long time ago, but which you’d still like, somehow, to believe could make good. You may not be the country you should have been, I would have said, but at least put on the mask. At least pretend.

In 2016, I think I—and perhaps others—grieved that ability to believe in the possibility of being proven wrong. And maybe that fossilized idealism has been buried for so long, now, that we can’t even remember the mask, or what it is that we’re supposed to be so mad about. Mayeb we cringe instead of feeling it. After all: We knew he was a snake when we elected him. What is there to be surprised at? Cynicism calms what grief there might otherwise have been: You’re surprised? You didn’t already know?!

But, of course, we didn’t, and that’s worth going back for, I think, all the more in a moment where we’d like to flatter ourselves with the idea that we know what we’re in for. We don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if Trump 1 somehow “prepared” us for Trump 2? If, with the narcissistic bias of the survivor, we could presume that we’ll be all right this time too? IBut as I look at the things he’s doing, I’m instantly disabused of that notion. And so, if it was a little too easy to be shocked and mournful in 2016, the path of least resistance, borne of slumbering political consciousnesses shocked roughly into disoriented and confused hyperalertness, I am feeling like the quietism of the present is the opposite kind of problem. We’re stunned, still, overwhelmed and numb. Maybe the task of the present, today, is to rediscover what it takes to be outraged, to sincerely believe, and to remember how to grieve again. We’ve been sick, and we still are sick, but perhaps, the time will come when, again, there’s work to do. Maybe making that time come sooner is the work.