Rumm Road by Alice Elliott Dark, 2012
The magic trick:
Wrapping itself in a smug point of view that the rest of the story punctures
It’s amazing to look back at the start of the Obama presidency and recall that it felt for so many of us like a new beginning. A decade and a half later, it’s starting to look more like a last gasp.
“Rumm Road” captures the terror of parents from that era – 2010, I suppose is the specific setting here – feeling as though they are barely holding on with the pace of change they see their children moving at. Just wait, guys! Come back in 2018 and see how we’re doing!
As such, this is an outstanding story for crystallizing a certain feeling for a certain group of people – upper middle class white liberals who feel pretty good about all they’ve got figured out. This story presents that smug point of view up front. But don’t worry, if it puts you off. The rest of the story’s plot reveals all the failings of that point of view.
And that’s quite a trick on Dark’s part.
The selection:
We were happy, too, because we still liked the president, even if he wasn’t all we’d hoped for. Still, he was sane, and wanted the good things, the decent things, for the country. It was such a relief not to feel constantly oppressed and angry—to feel hope again, as we hadn’t for a very long time. We’re a liberal town for the most part, and the breaches of the Bush presidency had distressed us beyond measure. The atmosphere poisoned us, made us paranoid and judgmental. Now, a couple of years later, we felt thawed out, closer to being our real selves, magnanimous and civic-minded, with energy to direct into community action. In spite of all the problems in the world, and our very real money worries, we were waking up from a bad dream. We wanted our children to have faith in the government, too. Our teens had grown up during Bush, and that had made many of them cynical and apathetic. During the 2008 election, while we were knocking on doors and paying close attention to every vicissitude in the polls, we’d had to explain to them why the candidates weren’t all the same, why a good president mattered. Some of the kids were on board, and knocking doors beside us. Others couldn’t see anything beyond their own experience, and for that we couldn’t blame them.
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