What Watching Fox News Did to My Elderly Mother: A Selection from Marilynne Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? (2018)

“My mother lived to be ninety-two. She spent her last decades, her widowhood, in a condominium in a retirement community near my brother and his family in Charlottesville, Virginia. She had lived a very private, sheltered, small-town life, never employed, devoted to her flowers and her dogs. She was a sharp-minded woman, aware and proud of her intelligence to the end of her life. She was complicated, and my relationship with her was never easy, but it was interesting, which was probably better for me, all in all. With a little difficulty we finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship. Then she started watching Fox News.

She had a circle of friends who watched Fox News, then gathered to share that peculiar salacious dread over coffee cake. My mother would call to ask me if I thought the world was coming to an end, which put me at something of a loss. I would tell her that, according to Jesus, we would not know the day or the hour, but she would always have just been updated by one of those commentators she and her circle called by their first names, as if they were trusted friends. The authority of Jesus was not quite robust in the light of breaking news. Sharia law! A war against Christmas! Who, she would say, would attack Christmas?! Just about nobody, of course, but the point of her question was not to doubt that the plot was afoot but to isolate these imagined malefactors from the human and American norm. These instances may sound absurd but they are real, and, like many things of their kind, they estranged and alienated a significant part of the population from those dark forces—I must include myself here—who would and could, for example, put a radical Kenyan Muslim in the White House.

I know I risk raising doubts about my mother’s soundness of mind when I say that she was deeply persuaded of the truth of what she heard from Sean and Megan and Bill. But she was at least as acute as any of the millions who watched with her and learned to share the same view of the world, and, crucially, of the country.

Toward the end of her life, my mother began to be tormented by anxieties and regrets. I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America. I would go to hell for it, too, a fact she considered both regrettable and just. She did shoulder some blame. She should have been far stricter than she was all those years ago when my character was still forming. A mother less Fox-saturated might have taken satisfaction from degrees and prizes, but to her they were proof that I was in league with the sinister Other; they were enhancements of a prominence I could only misuse. My mother lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic, never having had the slightest brush with any experience that would confirm her in these emotions, except, of course, Fox News. She went to her rest before she would have had to deal with the ignominy of my conversation with the president. I saw a clip of some Fox blondie saying that our conversation proved that Obama hated Christianity. Those who have read my books might think me an odd choice of interlocutor if that were the case, but having struggled in the tangled web of my mother’s reasoning, I know that the impassioned little commentator might actually have found a way to believe what she said. If not, the polarization she was at that moment exploiting and making worse meant there was precious little chance her listeners would pick up a copy of The New York Review of Books to read the conversation for themselves.

One mother, one life to live by which she would judge the fruitfulness of her own life, one twilight in which human mortality becomes at the same time mythic and real. I wish it could have ended better for both of us. What a weird intrusion, these loud voices shouting down memory and reflection and assurance, nullifying the most intimate kinship. My mother loved this country and was deeply persuaded that it was in peril, first of all in having tempted the wrath of God with all its liberalism. Again, this was not dementia. She and her friends were actually or virtually housebound. If they had kept their eyesight and their driver’s licenses, I have no doubt that some of them would have been out shopping for guns, as so many of the young and strong were doing at the same time for the same reasons.

This is, of course, the age of the weird intrusion. We have voices in our heads that can neutralize experience and displace the world we observe with a much more urgent and dramatic reality, a reality with a plotline and strongly identified characters, with villains bent on enormity and all that is sacred in desperate need of rescue. For my mother and her friends, this was excitement, a big dose of adrenaline, and its appeal in their circumstances is understandable, at least by comparison with its attraction for people who are healthy and mobile and who still enjoy some exposure to the world and some control over their lives. . . .

Dystopian media . . . would lose a great part of its market share if Christian standards were applied to its product, and then the atmosphere of this dear country would change in a week. The truth about Obama’s birthplace or Trump’s relations with Russia will never be established to the satisfaction of everyone, but Christians know truth of another order, that human beings are created in the image of God. They are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights—that is, unalienable claims on our respect. This is the truth that has made us free.”—Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)