The Disassembling of America

And what I learned from IKEA

When we moved into our house here in Maine I put together the last piece of IKEA furniture I ever intend to. It's the desk I'm sitting at right now and it's fine except for a drawer just below one of my hands I’m typing with.

I've assembled a fair amount of IKEA stuff in my life and I do admire their user friendly directions for putting their furniture together. They consist of only pictures instead of the maddeningly dark alleys of words I’ve been taken down too often by other instruction guides.

This desk I tackled was a project— a sort of IKEA final exam —with fourteen pages of pictures and I thought I was acing it until...

I had completed the assembly and was about to start filling up the desk’s two drawers. The one on the left side pulled out easily but the one on the right got stuck less than halfway. Way less than half way…

I figured that I had put a screw in the wrong place and found where it was located but it was beyond my reach to unscrew. I started to remove screws in other places to clear the way but this didn't help. Somehow, some way, the screw I had screwed up must have been screwed in much earlier in the assemblage.

I kept disassembling and the desk was no longer upright and now balancing sideways on my lap as I continued to reverse the work I had done and CRASH!!! It escaped my grasp and dropped on the floor accompanied by the sound of cracking wood.

If you've ever assembled a piece of IKEA furniture yourself, then you are likely familiar with the little wooden pegs that you insert on the ends of the larger pieces of particle board to join them together. They are called dowels. My dropping the desk sheared off a bunch— broke them into pieces! I was angry and that gave way quickly to despondency.

What had been my innocent mistake quickly needed a scapegoat. I blamed IKEA and VOLVO and ABBA and all of SWEDEN. I asked myself what would Henrik Ibsen do? Yeah, I know he's Norwegian but that put him in the neighborhood. 

I was mentally treading water in order not to sink further into depression. My mind, working like it does, suggested I write a tragic play with a title— "A Dowel’s House." Even spellcheck thought it was a stupid idea.

I left the desk in a heap for two days while I fumed and considered my options.

1. I could call IKEA and while trying not to curse, order lots of parts or even ask for a new desk for free. 

2. I could hire someone more competent than I or even a carpenter to take over and try to repair the damage.

3. I could just put the damn thing back together as best I could and live with a gimpy drawer if in fact the desk could even be resurrected to that condition again.

I chose the last option and have pulled out that drawer just now. For the first six inches it's fine, after that it's a bit of a tug.

“Going around Robin Hood’s barn” is an expression I’ve heard used to describe someone who has taken a long time to get to the point. And although I’m not aware that Robin Hood ever had a barn, I’ll plead guilty to taking you on a stroll through Sherwood Forest and confess that my IKEA experience is the setup to how I’ve been feeling for a long time about what’s happening to our country. I’ve been watching us disassembling.

Here’s the short list of some of what has been astounding and appalling…

1. A former president who spreads dangerous falsehoods and incited a violent insurrection attempt is now a felon running for reelection,

2. A Supreme Court that has members who have been unabashedly unethical is reversing long held precedents— decisions that the majority of the country often oppose.

3. A shocking debate performance by our current president has divided his political party and demoralized its members.

These things are increasingly distressing to me and that’s why I’ve been remembering the moment the IKEA desk fell off my lap. It was sudden and shocking but looking back I believe inevitable. All the taking apart of what I had put together had weakened the desk to the point that it collapsed.

The United States is not a piece of IKEA furniture and perhaps equating my desk to what I’ve observed taking place in America is ludicrous. But I am convinced that I am witnessing things that I have believed in and taken for granted about our nation all my life getting disassembled piece by piece— screw by screw.

I realize this is a downer of an analogy but hey, I’m sitting at my IKEA desk that I didn’t know was salvageable until I decided that I’d attempt to put it back together.

The desk has held up with its sheared dowels and served me well for 14 years. But here we are in the reality of 2024 and I worry that the institutions and laws that have served us well for way longer may not withstand the pressure that will surely further test them. Can the America we’ve known be reassembled again? Or are we to become something very different very soon?