Joy, Joylessness, and Durability in the American Project

December 01, 2025

One day a High School English teacher at my gigantic public high school in Manhattan paused the lesson. He placed his hands shoulder-width apart on his ancient desk. He lifted his legs and hooked his toes on the rim of the chalkboard behind him, and there he was: suspended in the air, floating above the sullen earth towards the end of period three on a dismal November day.

“Have you ever seen anyone do this before,” he asked? He looked around from his perch, mischievous joy sparkling in his eyes beneath his mop of white hair. He held the pose, and then the period bell rang.

That the teacher in question happened to be Frank McCourt, who would later win a Pulitzer for his memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” is only partly relevant. Mr. McCourt was celebrating the weirdness and joy of being human, the possibility and story in every moment. And, like all good artists, he was messing with our heads, to pop us out of our usual selves, into the realms of creativity and new thought that have always moved civilizations forward. For a teenager unhappy to be in school at all, McCourt was a welcome light in a dusty world.

The Portland Frog reminded me of that moment now 40 years ago, the way it stood there with its belly out like a three-year-old asking for cookies, and the cowboy-laconic toughness the suit’s occupant expressed after an ICE agent pepper sprayed his vent hole: “I’ve tasted hotter tamales.”

Contrast this great fun to the singularly humorless White House, as best exemplified by White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt. In one exchange, she responded to a reporter’s inquiry about the significance of a Putin-Trump summit proposed for Budapest. Why there, he asked, since in 1994, that’s where Russia promised not to invade Ukraine if it gave up its nuclear weapons.

Leavitt responded with a string of insults. But the question was actually worthy, interesting, thoughtful: it would have been more fun to mull its implications and respond than to just be a jerk, which isn’t all that enjoyable.

Deranged as Trump is, he had always been quite funny, even if one didn’t like his humor. But even that modestly redeeming trait is gone in the bleakly self-serious White House. If I were an autocrat in training, I’d be worried about that, on durability grounds.

The late anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow are known for rethinking early human history in a way that credits neolithic peoples with intelligence, whimsy, and fun. In the spirit of the Portland Frog or Mr. McCourt, early humans may have initially avoided labor-intensive agriculture because they had other things to do, including storytelling, masquerades, or traveling. Maybe early signs of trade were not nascent capitalism, he argues, but the result of vision quests; or of women gambling.

Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun: early democracy in the U.S. was certainly colored by those qualities. When an exhausted John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, he went straight to a bar—City Tavern. Pursuit of happiness, anyone? And yes, dark projects occur, but they rarely last long.

Visiting my mother recently in that same city of Philadelphia, close to her 88th birthday, I wondered what characteristics lead to a long life and other durable human projects. My mom marched in No Kings Day; suggested we visit a unique beer shop with hundreds of ales; maybe, she offered, it would be fun to get some Thai beer to pair with our meal; perhaps you would like to attend the Euphonium concert I’m hosting tomorrow night?

Helping her declutter her storage closet, I held up a Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee can. “What are we doing with this?” I asked. “Oh, I was saving it because it had the Twin Towers on it…it might be valuable.” Indeed, the can featured the skyline of my youth. “It’s art,” I said. “We’ll keep it,” placing it on a shelf for display, an arabica-scented monument to a city as it once was, still a place of joy and loss and resilience.

Photos from within Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers show a contrasting vision of the city: pictures of humans in distress, put upon by violent masked monstrous agents. The victims’ faces were a panoply of the diversity of the American experience. Perhaps some were vicious criminals; but most seemed to be moms, children, or laborers. If they were Tren de Aragua, would they be crying?

In the contrast between that dungeon and my mom’s happiness project, I caught a glimpse of the reason our country has endured and thrived, even despite ingrained faults like bigotry and inequality. We’ve ultimately rewarded, and been rewarded by, entrepreneurial joy, and those projects have often succeeded: the World’s Fairs; the National Parks; the Eagles.

The purveyors of darkness, they just aren’t that compelling to those of us who aspire to a measure of glee and wonder in our brief days and years. That quality may not be enough to save us now, but it’s a force, for certain, to be reckoned with.