We've been here before

Terence Mann and something lost... Debate night in America... New fear-mongering about immigrants... Blood libel re-emerges.

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I was thinking yesterday how I’d yet to watch Field of Dreams this summer and told myself I’d do it last night, then a few minutes later got a notification that James Earl Jones had died. This is what people in recovery call a “God wink.” So I watched it last night and it was just as good as it always is. I especially like the part where Ray Kinsella’s wife stands up at a PTA meeting and speaks out against banning books. She gets a whole room full of white people in rural Iowa to agree that the concept of banning books is antithetical to the spirit of America.

Ray Kinsella’s wife calls the woman who wants to ban Terence Mann’s book a “fascist,” then a man in the audience says Mann was “probably a Communist.” Seems apt.

One of the things that’s so brilliant about Field of Dreams is that we can see ourselves in so many of the characters it contains. Are we Shoeless Joe Jackson, seeking redemption in the afterlife for something that happened in this one? Are we Moonlight Graham, trying to live out a dream that eluded us? Are we Ray Kinsella, searching for inner peace and a resolution with our father only to realize we had it all along in the form of the wife and child, the life we’d made?

Or are we Terence Mann, disappearing into the cornfield in search of the greatest story of them all — the one that none of us knows the end to?

Each of us has to answer that for ourselves, and Field of Dreams allows us to consider the possibilities of our lives reflected in the characters on screen.

That sense of wonder feels missing from our current reality. Real life is not a movie. Politics is not a glistening-eyed James Earl Jones monologue about America, our past, hope, and the future. It can be sometimes, but that’s not guaranteed. No, what I mean is, for those of us who pay attention to the daily grind of this presidential campaign, it is grim, dark stuff.

Most Americans don’t see the minute madness of all of this like people like me whose job it is to pay attention — they’re busy working jobs that take them offline, and spending time with their families in the evening. So they may not even see some of the troubling developments from just the past few days:

• Trump once again proved he won’t concede this election if and when he loses, adding that he’ll use his second term in the White House to punish his political enemies, specifically by prosecuting and imprisoning anyone he deems to have “CHEATED” in the election. (No evidence of widespread fraud in 2020. No evidence people are trying to cheat in ‘24, either.)

• In the same rant, Trump said he’ll free and pardon anyone who’s been convicted of a crime for their actions at the attempted insurrection. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on MSNBC last night pointed out something that we’ll probably have to take note of in the event of forthcoming political violence: “[Trump] is holding up a giant sign that says when he loses this election, anyone who will resort to any form of violence to try to help him get the White House [...] he will give them all a blanket pardon." Trump is “egging them on,” Warren said. No doubt.

• In one of his rambling campaign rally moments where he fantasizes about rounding up and deporting immigrants, Trump said those efforts will be a “bloody story.” Likes blood stuff, this guy.

• On the blood libel front, JD Vance shared a false story that has gone viral on the right about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets. (Jesus Christ look at the sentence. Obviously they’re not.) Elon Musk of course shared it and now it’s gone nuclear, so you can expect to see it popping up in your uncle’s Facebook feed soon if it already hasn’t. 

• The typical fear-mongering about immigrants that has driven Trump’s rise to power is now accompanied by a new storyline that brings the possibility of violence in November: that undocumented immigrants are and plan to vote for Harris and steal the election from Trump. 

Every presidential election of my lifetime has been deemed to be the most important presidential election of my lifetime, but at 40 years old this one actually feels like it fits the bill. The majority of the Republican party lives in a fantasy world of widespread election fraud and marauding immigrants that, combined, spell the bloody and violent end of America. The irony is, of course, that it’s these false visions that have urged them toward an abyss of outright racism and fascism that has only one apt corollary in modern history. 

I don’t have any nice, neat way to wrap this up other than to point out that if Field of Dreams were made today it would reviled by the right as subversive to their concept of American values, and to say that I hope that tonight will be enough for the few Americans who will decide this election to finally see and understand Donald Trump for what he is. If they can’t see it after tonight, I don’t think they ever will. If they choose to again go down the dark and disastrous path that so many Americans already have in choosing Trump to lead us, I have a hard time seeing how we come back from that. 

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