Matthew McConaughey

A few days ago, with somewhat bittersweet timing, Marvel Entertainment made an exciting announcement. This was at a time when low information people — up to and including the president — were realizing that, uhh, hey Chuck, this virus thingy might be quite a big deal. Might be a good time to stock up on rice and beans, you know? Back to Marvel’s announcement. They were creating a new generation of heroes for a grateful populace! Their names you ask? Well, there was Screentime, a ‘meme-obsessed super teen’ who has the ability to use Google without a WiFi connection. There was Snowflake (they/them) and Safespace; the former throws psychic snowflake shurikens at people who read Breitbart and the latter generates a pink force shield around them as they do so.

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.