(A Note: the addendums and footnotes after the main Post may be worth your time to read. I have not recorded them.)
More and more I think in long screams of fury and powerlessness. Or I imagine the US as one of those 
spinning cylinders at a fairgrounds, the Rotors, where you pay your money to be held fast against a wall by centrifugal force and the floor drops out and there you are pinned up and screaming. Except I take the whole little movie to its ultimate end and watch it blow apart and star-burst bodies and machine pieces everywhere. It sure feels like that, and we are not even to the really awful parts yet. When I am tired and chin-deep in tales of imperial corruption, the dying of the natural world, feral politicians and ever more evidence that crime sure does pay when you are rich, white, connected and old, I mumble to myself, “We are so fucked!” I know a collective penultimate scream is building up in us, Trump supporters and opposition all.
We are living in a bad time that does not yet feel like an end time — money is being made, people are working, football is king, we continue to burrow into our online worlds and the fantasies replete on every other kind of screen. Yes, Trump is the lunatic raging in the corner, smashing the furniture, furious in his decay, but who has not learned to tune him out after all these months.
I do not know where we fit on a timeline for a cataclysm. I suspect we will fall apart through governmental rot and as a result of draconian laws and attitudes (abortion (1), voter suppression and gerrymandering, tax inequality, the tyranny of a Republican minority, the eternal faintheartedness of Democrats), before we go to war, but climate change is here and will grow so much more apparent with every season. When will the population migrations kick in within our borders, the rivers flood ceaselessly or dry up, the seas demolish all those rich shore towns, fields drown in incessant rain or blow away in renewed dust storms, tornadoes descend like Valkyries everywhere across the Midwest?
We have been here before, on the edge, utterly unaware of the plunge to come, but that was 158 years ago (1861) and that’s just history and Americans’ ignorance of history is depthless, as is our ability to believe in fairy tales.
Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote that “too many Americans clear across the political spectrum remain afflicted by what psychologist Elizabeth Mika has defined as “narcissistic blindness,” a pathological byproduct of American exceptionalism, our “conviction that It can’t happen here because we are the beacon of democracy, we have our esteemed institutions, and other self-serving fairy tales reasserting American superiority and invincibility … as if we were exempt from the universal laws governing humanity since time immemorial.”(2)
So, really, we haven’t been here. Not Americans. Others have of course.
In The Captive Mind Czeslaw Milocz wrote about the role of writers living under post-War Stalinist regimes in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe. In one chapter he offers a series of observations about the United States circa 1951, but his conclusions bear repeating now, in light of our present political struggles.
In World War II he had seen his city, Warsaw, and Poland as a whole reduced to poverty and ruin. Until that kind of apocalypse, “man tends to regard the world he lives in as natural,” and the rhythms of his normal life “as essential to the harmonious functioning of the world.” In other words, men and women will live comfortably within an illusion as long as they can, the illusion being the deep faith that their way of life, their comforts, work and safety will abide no matter what happens elsewhere. Milocz had seen this assumption first hand in pre-War Warsaw and Paris.
So, what happens when war comes to their homes: “[Their] first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes [their] faith in the naturalness of his world. Overnight, money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper. [They] acquire new habits quickly.” They grow accustomed to “stepping over corpses in the street, to shattered houses, and to checkpoints where people disappear into vans never to be seen again.”
He also makes the point that most people do not see the catastrophe before it arrives. Until close to the end, the Poles believed a way would be found to stave off Hitler and Stalin. They remained innocent — as in naive — and that “innocence “result[ed] in a lack of imagination.” They could not imagine what we know now came down upon them like all the Furies.
Something Robert Caro said recently has stayed with me: “You don’t know if this is an aberration or not, if Trump is something outside, and he’s going to lose, and we’ll forget, or, is he the first of the mad Roman emperors?” (4)
I do not hold out hope that the 2020 election will change much, even if Trump is defeated. That evil prick Mitch McConnell will return, and the preference of Republicans for a monarchy is going nowhere. Joe Biden, the current polling frontrunner for the Democratic nomination recently said, “I just think ,… the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” Statements like that make me wonder if dementia isn’t coded into Democratic leaders’ DNA.
While Attorney General Bill Barr and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin lurch forward with efforts to make Trump immune to all Congressional oversight, while NS advisor Bolton tries to push us into a war with Iran (5), while tens of thousands of migrants suffer in privatized camps (including 14,000 children), while the President prepares to pardon service members convicted of war crimes, Schumer and Pelosi refuse to fully exploit their power to fight back. Democrats should be fighting back everywhere, on all fronts. Many decibels of my scream are produced by their inaction and excuses.
I’m done writing about Trump. If you want more, then read Suetonius and Tacitus who have much deeper insights then I will ever produce.
I’ve been looking for some way and place to throw time and energy where action may provide even a quantum of relief from the damage done and the damage to come.
Screaming, of course, produces only noise. After the scream comes the work necessary to stand against monstrous actions and to save what can be saved. There are children here and more coming who will inherit the consequences of our history. Despair is an indulgence, a luxury that will only make us poorer.
(1) abortion: I am ‘pro-life”, (whatever that term even means in this country anymore) but the laws in Missouri, Alabama, etc. are about the control of women’s sexuality, more than any reverence for life and children. The details of the laws are brutal. Only the fetus is so worthy of such devotion from these legislators and activists. Not children in schools blown to pieces by gunfire, not the children of Flint poisoned by lead, not Native American, Syrian, Yemeni, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Mexican children, not children after they are born. These laws are also about an Old Testament view of heterosexual men and their power. After abortion, they will come for same-sex marriage and the civil rights of gay men and women. If you do not believe that, you have not been listening to them.
(2) O’Hehir, Andrew. “Democracy’s in real trouble — and the mainstream media’s finally noticing”. May 15, 2019. Salon Magazine.
(3) I will vote for whomever the Democrats nominate. As my wise friend has said, “The point right now is just to stop Trump.” Period.
(4) Caro, Robert. The New York Times, April 17, 2019
(5) After Bush II’s brutal, stupid, dishonest war in Iraq, after Trump’s cancellation of the nuclear weapons deal, after the 100,000 lies that have poured out of this Administration on every subject, I will not believe anything they say about Iran.
Addendum: Trump’s ascent to the Presidency, his abuse and use of power and the Republican’s evolution into a zombie political party (they stagger forward, they mutter and scream, they cannot think, they only destroy), calls into question my relationship with patriotism. I guess I’m supposed to say “I love my country”, slap a flag up somewhere and that should do and thus fulfill the rote guides to demonstrate my loyalty and affection.
I love many things American and am appalled by many things American. I love the National Parks, our preservation of wilderness and endangered species. I love most cops, most armed forces volunteers, veterans, firemen and women, EMT’s, teachers, nurses, crisis and gang intervention counselors, farmers, etc, the ones who run into the fear, who work long hours, who sacrifice for the common good.
I love talking to Americans, especially westerners, the self-reliant, and the ones who are funny, dignified, and have a story to tell. I love American places — Big Sky Country, Pennsylvania Springs, Provincetown and Maine light. I love how far we’ve come. Adam Gopnik argues that “although the failure of the Republic to sustain its ideals is appallingly self-evident, elections involving millions of people [are] held routinely, if imperfectly; [Muslims and Catholics and] Jews worship freely; freethinkers flourish; [in spite of Trump’s best efforts], immigrants are still being settled; reformers rage against corruption, and, in [some] cases, win their battles; dissent, even radical dissent, [is] aired and … on the whole, heard and tolerated. No arrangement like it had ever been known before on so large a scale in human history. Compared with the system’s ambitions and pretensions, it was as nothing. But, compared with the entirety of human history before, it [is], in its way, quite something.” (6)
(6) Gopnik, Adam. “How the South Won the Civil War”, The New Yorker, April 8, 2019
