The Warm Impermanence Of Twenty Years

It was early August 2004 and I was watching the sun set on a remote Greek island called Chios, listening to Radiohead’s anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war album on my iPod and feeling the existential vibes of the upcoming presidential election, my first as a voter. I buzzed with anticipation and, naturally, fear.

We didn’t call them vibes back then. No one had vibes. We called them feelings. Either way, the 2004 election – pitting the SCOTUS-appointed George W. Bush against John Kerry – seemed existential. A war was raging, our constitutional rights were being curtailed in the name of terrorism, gas prices were laughably high, and Bush officials were talking like supervillains, talking and writing gleefully about waging dozens of little wars across the world in the name of a New American Century. 

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The draft-dodging Bush was playacting American warrior and wearing an enormous codpiece on a battleship and growing a cult of personality that proclaimed in one voice that if you supported the Democratic nominee, you hated both the troops and the mere idea of the United States. It was the early days of our apocalyptic political scene, and as I watched the shimmering orange sun sink behind a mountain range beyond a pristine sea, I was certain a Bush victory would be the end of the world, that the End Times I heard so much about in my Baptist high school had finally come (this is all my school’s teachers and administrators ever wanted). 

Thom Yorke crooned about the loonies taking over and the sun vanished and my girlfriend (now wife) smiled and tapped me on the shoulder and said it was time to go to dinner and I said OK and turned off my music and tried to let the dread fall into the background of my thoughts.

Twenty years on, my wife shook me awake one morning on the Greek island of Chios to tell me Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump had been shot. I spent the next hour doomscrolling like no one has ever doomscrolled, watching the footage of the assassination attempts over and over, the photos of a bloodied Trump raising his fist and leveraging the horrific moment for political gain (he understands better than most that politics is a show; his showmanship is second to none), reading people I respect saying the presidential race was essentially over. I had made a public pledge not to engage in the poison of doomerism, so I tried to let the existential terror float into one ear and out the other, seeing it for what it was: A thought, a screaming, bloody thought that demanded my attention. 

I finally put my phone down and made myself breakfast and ate on the patio outside our little stone hotel room. There sat my two kids, who weren’t around the last time I was in Greece, and my wife, who I had been dating for a couple years when we first made the trip with her family to Chios in 2004. The kids asked questions about the assassination attempt and the shooter. They wanted to know if the shooter was dead, if Trump was in the hospital, if Biden would be next. I imagined this scene being described to 20-year-old me in August 2004: My children asking me about the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, the casino magnate and reality show guy with the fucked-up combover who says, “You’re fired.” It was surreal in the worst possible way. 

The 2004 presidential election – after which I dressed in all black for a while – was not, in fact, existential. The sun rose the next day, as Barack Obama told his weeping staffers after Trump had clinched the 2016 race, and life went on. There was another election in 2008, which Obama won easily and drove the American right into its current death-cult form. All the dread I had felt – all the extremely bad vibes – was for naught. While a lot of truly awful shit happened during the second George W. Bush administration (hey look, the U.S. military is torturing people now), the republic stood and moved on from those dark days. 

It made me wonder, as I lounged around some searingly hot Greek beaches without a sliver of shade in which to cower, if my existential dread for this upcoming presidential contest was misplaced. Was I making the same miscalculation as I did at 20, as a rising college junior? Would the American republic roll on even if the loonies – talking openly about rolling back the 20th century – took over? 

Would I look back in another twenty years and realize how silly I’d been in 2024? It called to mind a New York Times interview with far-right influencer Steve Bannon before he was sent to prison for a few months. Bannon, in his vainglorious and obscenely dramatic style, said the American left would one day wish for Donald Trump. He said liberals and leftists would one day, in the not-too-distant future, look back on Trump fondly, and wish he were in charge, because man, that Trump was moderate compared to the New Guy (possibly JD Vance or someone with a stronger chin). This struck me as unserious and infuriating until I recalled how many on the American left during the Trump era have wished for a return to the Bush-era Republican Party, which was moderate in that it would probably recognize the legitimacy of American elections. Bush’s GOP was of course miles to the right of Reagan’s GOP, which was lightyears to the right of Nixon’s GOP. Now we have Trump, who adores the shit out of dictators and has no politics but empowers those with the most heinous, backward political views imaginable. 

Democracy and capitalism coexisted for a while. The one that must grow or die ended up overpowering the one designed to maximize citizen participation and the common good. Probably this shouldn’t come as a shock. Karl Marx says he told ya so. Marx: The king of hollow victories. 

The Ripples Change Their Size

You won’t believe this, dear Bad Faith Times reader, by my return to Greece made me think of David Bowie lyrics. I know, you’ve never been more stunned to hear anything. I’ll give you a moment. 

In 1971’s “Changes,” Bowie sings of watching “the ripples change their size, but never leave the stream of warm impermanence.” I’m going to sound like a human fortune cookie for a moment and say that the only thing in life that’s permanent is change, which for me – as someone who fears change like the reaper – is really a tough break. Shoutout to consciousness, you bitch. 

Being back in Chios, seeing the same sights and smelling the same smells and tasting the same foods and drinks while being in a completely different season of my life – it washed over me all at once when we were frantically packing to leave on a ferry back to mainland Greece. Call it the warm impermanence. Whatever it was, it hit me like a sledgehammer right in the heart as I stuffed my suitcase twenty minutes before we needed to leave for the port. I welled up and thought for a moment I could beat back the feelings like a Real Man. But I could not. I cried for the first time in a (very) long time and tried like hell to keep the tears from my family because, well, we were hustling and didn’t have time to tend to my existential meltdown during our final minutes in Chios. 

I dutifully wiped my tears and kept packing and tried not to sniffle, desperately not wanting to explain to my kids why dad was weeping in our final hours in Chios. I wondered where all those years had gone, those two decades that have defined my life and somehow slipped by while, at times, seeming interminable. I finally collected myself until I was lugging my bags and my kids’ bags to the little European car we had rented for the trip. That warm impermanence slugged me again right between the eyes and there I was, crying with sunglasses on, walking down a steep hill toward our car, balancing three heavy bags that I would need to stuff into the tiny Fiat. This time I was sobbing: I thought of the passage of another twenty years, and how things would change, and how my children would be adults with their own families and I would be old – not haha old, but just really fucking old – and my parents and my in-laws would be long gone and I would remember when I was 40 and beat myself up for not enjoying this era more than I do. 

When does the prime of one’s life begin? Has anyone done the math? Can anyone share the analytics of life-prime and when to really appreciate it? Please. I’ll pay anything. 

On the way home – two six hour flights back to Washington – I made every effort to notice things that had changed and those that had not. A little boy sitting next to me was battling Bowser on his Nintendo Switch, the way I had at my buddy’s house in 1988, except for the magical handheld video game device the boy manipulated with ease – a technology that would have put me into a coma as a kid. No one wore masks anymore, the way they had four years ago when a killer virus was ripping through the population and creating political and cultural fissures that would never heal. 

Walking through the airport’s corridors, there were no signs or announcements of flashing TVs warning of an imminent terrorist threat, the way there were 15 or 20 years ago in the horrifying afterglow of 9/11. The pulsating fear that once defined air travel had faded completely. Maybe the terrorists had given up. There’s only so much terrorizing one can do, I suppose. Even so, I had to take off my fucking shoes at the security checkpoint, and a TSA agent had to caress me with a wand because I had left a single dime in my jeans pocket. 

Paying attention to things changed and unchanged, I guess, is a decent way to take stock of the often imperceptible changes that create a wholly different world over a yawning 20-year stretch like the one I had between visits to Greece. It’s so much time and no time at all. It’s the distant past and yesterday. It’s wonderful and awful. 

Almost every night during our two weeks in Greece, some combination of our group would gather to watch the sun set behind the distant mountains on the other side of a massive body of water that may or may not have been the Aegean Sea. One night, I joined my father-in-law in marveling at the speed in which the sun sinks in its final moments. There it went, zipping behind the mountaintops with a striking suddenness. It couldn't have possibly been moving that fast the whole time, could it? It must have sped up. My father-in-law chuckled and said it was the realization you had late in life: It was always moving at such a clip. Only then, with your mortality looming larger than ever, does it strike you how quickly life – and the sun – move. I sipped my beer and tried not to dwell on that thought.

A young, pre-super stardom Bowie, in the final verse of Changes, warns his ascendant rock-and-roll brethren that they’re gonna get really fucking old really fucking fast. I imagine this lyric being greeted with youthful dismissiveness. It’s a warning: “Watch out you rock n rollers,” Bowie sings, “pretty soon now you’re gonna get older.”

I can confirm. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.