“I Am Now The Most Miserable Man Living”
Abraham Lincoln suffered from clinical depression—or as he called it, “melancholy”—before and during his tenure as president, notably in the barbarous days of the Civil War. Today, we’re used to seeing the stark disparity in those before-and-after shots showcasing the gray forests that materialize on our presidents’ heads due to the stress of the job. (There’s even a revealing one for Lincoln.) But imagine being president of a charismatic yet brittle 85-year-old experiment called America, leading a country so embattled it’s on the verge of tearing itself to pieces, while somehow also grappling to preserve yourself and to not slip into a deep despondence over its division. The war was hell, and the seeds for Lincoln’s depression had been sown his entire life.
“I am now the most miserable man living,” then-state senator Lincoln wrote to his friend John T. Stuart in 1841. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” Forged in what was apparently a historically well-known lovelorn fog (as Lincoln attempted to navigate his turbulent relationship with Mary Todd, his fiancée), the words came to me not in an academic textbook but in a song—when New Jersey band Titus Andronicus repurposed them on their 2010 opus, The Monitor, as a bridge between two songs mired in anxiety. The first, “Titus Andronicus Forever,” repeats the harrowing refrain “The enemy is everywhere” enough times to induce paranoia, while the second, “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future,” opens with a fitting declaration: “Everything makes me nervous, and nothing feels good for no reason.”
At around 1 a.m. on November 9, 2016, shortly after it had become apparent that Donald Trump would be elected the 45th President of the United States, I saw a pair of tweets quoting Titus Andronicus lyrics from that album. So I got out of my Uber and marched directly up to my apartment and, before I even took my shoes off, I began blasting The Monitor as loudly as I could (one of the benefits of having no neighbors). That’s when it all hit me: This shit is real, and this album was oddly prescient in its rhetoric and tonality six years before we actually arrived at this fractious moment.
Singer Patrick Stickles’ snarling voice permeates The Monitor, blending the personal (a frustrating slew of losses that precipitate him fleeing the Garden State) and the political (Civil War imagery and voices from the past) in a heavy punk stew riddled with guitar stabs, crowd chants, barroom chaos, and pop culture references. “If [this town] deserves a better class of criminal,” he sings on opener “A More Perfect Union,” “then I’ma give it to ‘em tonight,” quoting The Joker’s anarchist lines from The Dark Knight. This is the same song, of course, where “Rally ‘round the flag!” becomes a sardonic refrain, and just two songs before another coda bursts open the entire operation: “You will always be a loser!” When I left work on Election Night and saw that this had become our new reality, these words were both brutalist and comforting in their misery and relevancy. I shouted them as loudly as I could, mostly to myself, thinking of the harrowing road that took us here.
The Monitor brims with lyrical turns of phrase; each one popped out like a bulging vein as 1 a.m. became two, then three, and I had to pour out what was left of my beer for the sake of not ruining the next day with a hangover (too late). And as I did, the words swirled around, each refrain taking on a new resonance. “Nothing means anything anymore,” Stickles’ ragged voice proclaims before invoking Elvis Costello’s 1977 anti-fascist anthem: “Everything is less than zero.”
It gets worse.
“I’ve been called out, cuckolded, castrated,” he admits on “A Pot In Which To Piss,” seemingly ready to admit defeat, all the while conjuring up the entire idea of emasculation that helped elect a demagogue—a reality television star who simply cannot process criticism—before allowing for one glimmer of hope: “But I survived.” I’m not so sure America will at this point. “You’d like everyone to believe you’re a star, and I’ll admit that it’s worked out pretty well so far,” Stickles posits on “Four Score And Seven.” “But when they see the kind of person that you really are, then you won’t be laughing so hard.” God, I fucking hope so. But how long will it take for Trump supporters who voted against their economic interests (and, a strong case suggests, often on racist and xenophobic grounds) to realize they’ve been had? To understand that the fix is in, and that it didn’t come from Crooked Hillary Clinton but from the alleged swamp-drainer himself? I picture Secretary Clinton not delivering our next State of the Union address right as Stickles delivers one more gut punch: “And my heroes have always died at the end. So who’s going to account for these sins?” I want to vomit.
I don’t make it to “Theme From ‘Cheers,’” a wonderful song about saying hey fuck it and getting absolutely ripshit hammered, because there’s a bit of comic relief in its nihilistic excess, and I just can’t handle that in the moment (and yes, I’m already drunk). In fact, I shut the record off and try to wind down. But then I check Twitter again, and the sense of ruin intensifies. It’s a hate-spiral that I can’t seem to avoid. The lingering impact of The Monitor on my psyche as I finally drift to sleep around four in the morning all goes back to where it initially began in those tweets. “It’s still us against them,” the truest refrain on the entire album repeatedly screams, “and they’re winning.”
It’s been 12 days since the above events, and Sunday was the 153rd anniversary of Lincoln’s most enduring speech, the Gettysburg Address. But The Monitor closes not with those words, a celebration of those who died in pursuit of remaking the Union into a single entity, but with a snippet of Lincoln’s first inaugural address from two years before.
“We are not enemies, but friends,” the croaky-voiced Lincoln reader (played by Stickles’ former teacher Okey Chenoweth) recites. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection.” I just hope it’s not too late. And I certainly hope that “hope”—2008’s most fashionable buzzword that seemed largely absent from this campaign—is still as powerful as I know it can be.
