My superstitions multiplied and grew deeply embarrassing.
The ‘red mirage’ of an early Trump lead we had been warned about was in full effect on Tuesday night, the result of efforts in several states to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted early the count dragged on and on. But on 3 November 2020 what began in whimsy soon entered a clinical hell, the like of which hadn’t been seen since As Good as It Gets.
To watch 1776 as the votes are counted seems like a harmless tradition, if a little bit twee – a little bit neolib, perhaps, a little bit brunch. I had watched 1776 on Election Day in 2012, when Barack Obama was re-elected, but failed to do so again in 2016 perhaps that was where everything went off the rails. There is no comfort in setting any of it to music, but still I hummed the songs. He leaps up on a table and becomes the auctioneer, the room goes red like something laid open, and this is the moment when the real madness and murderousness of American history is allowed to break through: the madness that begins with legal slavery, winds its way alongside marchers down the road of racial injustice, and leads all the way up to the present, to the stranglehold that the electoral college continues to hold on the American people. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for independence until an anti-slavery clause is removed from the declaration. This song seems to emerge from the collective mouth of the dead – the dead lying on the lawn of the White House during any given presidency, victims of a regime whose face changes but whose hands are always the same. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after the victory. However, there are two scenes that flare to life. It is very, very boring, but at least no one raps in it, though you get the sense that Ben Franklin might have tried – in French. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is actually about him going down on her, and the Declaration of Independence, according to this origin story, is completed after he bangs her on a pile of foolscap and quill pens for 14 hours straight. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies.
John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. The year is – well, you know that part – and the flies of patriotism are buzzing in the room in colonial Philadelphia where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. You almost certainly haven’t seen it, so I’ll summarise it for you.
O n Election Day, as soon as the polls closed, I had to watch the three-hour-long 1972 movie musical 1776.