I have not been sleeping well.
Big deal.
Since 2016, the number of partial insomniacs world wide must be in the hundreds of millions.
Wendell Berry understood:
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be ….”*
Two or three nights a week at 2:17 or 3:03 or some other forsaken hour of utter quiet and aloneness, my eyes open, my mind already racing, and I try to push back on what I see coming closer and closer, that is, the end of the Republic. What I hear in these dreams is the sound of a nation committing suicide.
I know this is a form of panic — moral panic, emotional panic, a silent shriek of panic. I have harrowing visions, cinematic in their neon voltage and force. They are not prophecies, of course, but they are concussive in their effect. I keep telling myself it is not despair creating these images but an ongoing reassessment of political trends and facts. You see, I try to distance my heart from my mind. I try to go colder and think in terms of probabilities, vectors of convergence, historical antecedents, evidence. I try to explain to my shaken self that I am a blind man in a suddenly unfamiliar house teeming with every kind of noise and threads of music, and that I am missing so much of what is going on because I’m just trying to find my way out. This is my house. I have lived here 67 years.
But, it is of no use. This is a terrible moment in this country, the worst of my life since April to November of 1968. We are coming apart. History is coming for us, we, the bamboozled white citizens* of the United States who thought our national blessings were inexhaustible, our character forever worthy, our luck earned through grace and good works, but who now find out what happens when a deep and abiding racial hatred finds its perfect accomplice, a man who believes in nothing except his own glorification and a drive for complete power.
Donald Trump is where all the lines of the past and the present are crossing. Trumpism is one long scream infused with lies. It is undistilled hatred and undisguised corruption. That has always been the case, but now the volume is turned all the way up. What terrifies me is something new, a coalescing of structures around the scream: a DOJ led by political hack William Barr, ICE as a tool of arbitrary arrest, the DHS led by Chad Wolf — already doing the dirty work in the streets of provoking disorder in order to crush dissent, armed militias who see Trump as their perfect white god, police unions, FOX (Trump’s propaganda arm), the Republican Party of course, now completely owned by Trump, a roster of reactionary judges, and finally QAnon, a set of conspiracies that grow more demented by the day.
For the first time I can see how the Republic ends — with a stolen election, 4 more years of burning cities, organized Federal oppression, monumental corruption, economic collapse, climate change catastrophes, more dead black people, more dead brown people, more dead protesters, and beckoning on the horizon, a reawakening anti-Semitism.
Trump will try to win by screaming “Be afraid” from now to November because he can offer nothing else except fear and lies. He will burn everything down in order to retain power. He will murder what is left of democracy. And it might just work.
**If you are a black or brown or poor or a Native American, you probably realized long, long ago that those blessings were not meant to be extended to almost every one of you.
