Oh, Lost!

The Exclamation Point is Not Mine

“America is a nation of seekers, dreamers, and believers, yet it is also a land of lost illusions, broken hopes, and bitter disillusionment. It is at once the shining promise and the great disappointment.” - Thomas Wolfe

In his epic literary masterpiece You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe relies on a repeated use of the phrase, “Oh, lost!” as a kind of recurring invocation and lamentation for the passage of time. Thematically, I always assumed, he was signaling the fleeting nature of youth and the irretrievability of the past. I read the book when I was young, and the dense, ornate prose was probably beyond my ability to assimilate with any nuanced understanding. What I did grasp, however, was the book’s great sense of longing and nostalgia. Wolfe wanted to explore the loss of innocence and the disillusionment that comes with adulthood and experience. Literature, of course, can have refrains as resonant as lyrics in memorable songs and Wolfe used his to explore memory, change, and human frustration with our inability to return to the past, either literally or emotionally.

I have often wondered what his editor, Max Perkins of Scribner’s, must have thought when Wolfe showed up with the manuscript for Of Time and the River in several boxes, which accommodated one million words and five thousand pages of writing. The 6’6” Wolfe was often seen walking up and down the street in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, bragging to himself and anyone who might be around, “I wrote ten thousand words today!” as if volume equated with greatness. In his case, it did, but Perkins, and later Edward Aswell, faced the monumental task of taking his sprawling manuscript and turning it into timeless literature. They gave life to Wolfe’s autobiographical character George Webber as he constantly struggled with memories of home and childhood, only to find his idealized past no longer existed.

I have always felt there was a broader meditation to be acknowledged on Wolfe’s book. There lives a universal human condition, I think, in each of us, where we all begin to feel disconnected from our origins, places of our birth and youth. The simple passage of time might be the central culprit in this emotional disentanglement, but other factors are relevant like personal growth, societal changes, or maybe the realization that part of human advancement is to become estranged from the place whence we began. Wolfe, it is worth remembering, was deeply influenced by the rhythms of prose, and his repetition of “Oh, Lost!” gave his text a hymn-like quality, which, for me, provided the narrative a profound, almost disturbing subtext, and reinforced the novel’s emotional weight.

Thomas Wolfe with His Manuscript for “Of Time and the River”

Wolfe, like most of us in America today, was mourning the inescapable truth that time moves forward and that we cannot ever truly return to what we once knew, which might be our country’s ugly fate. It follows, logically, that as much as we all want to believe otherwise, the United States, history’s “last best hope” for humanity, may very well be finished. In just a matter of months, we have turned our country over to a despot, a man who views politics and history as nothing more than financial transactions between the powerful and wealthy. The border with our biggest trading partner has become more militarized than the Berlin Wall that one of our presidents once denounced and seemingly brought down with the rhetoric of freedom. We are erecting razor wire and pointing guns across the water at the poor and suffering, who seek our offered promise, while our national leader offers citizenship for $5 million dollars to wealthy foreigners.

Oh, lost! We probably cannot go back again to that time when we were recognized as an international standard for equality and our foundational aspiration that the people were the conscience of our country, and we inspired the world. Instead, we feed billions of dollars in bombs and guns and planes and armored bulldozers into a war machine committing genocide against a people while we withdraw support from a free nation fighting an invasion prompted by a dictator and supported by our president. American treaties with great nations have come to mean almost nothing and they no longer look westward for assurances and resources to stop oppression as it moves across the planet. The holder of our highest office demands only fealty of the public and business and political leaders, and there are far too many willing to bend the knee and kiss the ass while rationalizing their behavior as political compromise to move the country forward.

Our youth, no longer empowered, are ignored, and legal immigrants discover they do not have freedom of speech to criticize a favored nation like Israel. They are arrested and detained and held without charges because there are no crimes committed other than speaking opposition. On university and college campuses, where ideas were meant to be born and circulated and vivified, there is restraint instead of exuberance and innovation. Government funding is jeopardized if students express dissent. Voices against what power desires are silenced by threats of arrest and expulsion. There is only one good opinion and institutions failing to express it and understand guidelines face a loss of government resources. This was once a land of fearlessness, where the brave were loud and determined and set the course of history; no more, we have allowed our reputation and democracy to be sundered by egos and money and the soulless pursuit of power for nothing more than the sake of power. Oh, lost!

As imperfect as our democracy has been through its decades of emergence, we have still, nonetheless, struggled to make improvements. Proud citizens stood up to fire hoses and billy clubs to force the codification of minority rights into federal law but today our sacred national cemetery is erasing all records of Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and indigenous peoples from digital records, as if they never existed or fought and died for a nation that did not even treat them equally. Who are these people we have allowed to steal into our government and are more interested in pleasing a putative dictator than giving a ten-year-old girl with brain cancer a pass to get her treatment in Houston? Is it truly Americans who are almost gleefully cutting tens of thousands of jobs from the Veterans’ Administration and breaking a promise made to care for the people who went overseas and served in wars and were called to the colors of our flag? Where do they turn now for medicines and surgeries and psychological treatments for the mental wounds suffered in combat? Can such a betrayal even be measured?

Media in this country, too, used to stand up to tyrants, foreign and domestic, but in 2025 they settle multi-million dollar lawsuits filed against them by a president who disagrees with the facts reported in their journalism. Executives give in to demands to see reporters notes and outtakes. They settle legal claims and say nothing as he threatens to prosecute journalists and broadcasters and publications for doing “totally illegal reporting,” which is not a concept that exists in a nation founded on the First Amendment. Media are already chastened and their writing and speaking is restrained even as the presidential imposter threatens to use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm to prosecute his political opponents and the law officers who had investigated his lawlessness in a previous administration. He has set loose his billionaire consort upon the land and inside government walls to rape and ruin the institutions that have defined us as a people. The two of them seek nothing less than the complete evisceration of laws that attenuate corporate greed and plan to remove any obstacles to mining, plundering, harvesting, and drilling, regardless of environmental damage. Look for a dam at the end of the Grand Canyon.

I no longer recognize the country where I was born and raised. I’ve acknowledged its past sins regarding racism, slavery, sexism, and imperialist wars, but like most Americans I have believed in the founding dream, and assumed we would keep working toward a “more perfect union.” Our setbacks did not seem permanent and the cons in Congress and across Washington were usually ferreted out by our persistent common sense. Maybe, though, as the great George Carlin argued from many stages, we have no true control over anything in this democratic republic, and not even our vote counts. The “people who really run the country” do not want us educated or doing much more than making monthly payments on debt. There is a chance the last election proved Carlin’s analysis.

I remember, though, coming of age and believing that most anything was possible here and that I might try hard and work my way out of my parents’ disadvantages and have more opportunities. Perhaps, I was indoctrinated with patriotism taught culturally from childhood. Americans had just played an essential role in saving the world from another tyrant but are now confronted with a domestic incarnation and seem not to know how to respond. I recall clearly when Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman testified before Congress about the American president’s call to blackmail Ukraine with the threat of withholding military assistance unless that country investigated his Democratic opponent. Vindman began by thanking his father for bringing him and his brother to this country from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He had served in combat in Iraq, wore a purple heart from his wounds, and chest full of ribbons and commendations for his service. Eventually, Vindman had become a member of the National Security Agency, and possessed, to understate his qualifications, valuable perspective for his fellow Americans.

"In Russia, my act of offering public testimony involving the President would surely cost me my life,” he said. “I am grateful for my father's brave act of hope 40 years ago and for the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant, where I can live free of fear for mine [sic] and my family's safety. Dad, my sitting here today, in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth. Because here, right matters."

I’m not so sure it does anymore, Colonel Vindman.

Oh lost!