Past present and future
The New York Review of Books is running a series on living in Trumpworld. Katha Pollitt wrote a blisterer.
I sometimes feel like I’m a different person now. I’m fidgety and irritable and have trouble concentrating. For months after the election, I could hardly read, except for books about Roman history, which turns out to be full of Trumps: fantastically rich sociopaths obsessed with crushing their enemies.
Snap. I was thinking Nero-Caligula all day after the Man of the Year tweet.
My work seems trivial: Given what we are facing, what difference does one more Nation column make? I might as well be an ancient Egyptian scribe logging production figures for cat mummies. In the old days, the days before Trump, it bothered me that so many people loved things I thought were stupid. Now I just think, Go ahead, enjoy yourself. Maybe your Batman DVDs will comfort you when we’re wandering around in the ashen hellscape of whatever apocalypse Trump will bring down upon us.
Just about everything seems trivial, or futile and hopeless. Trump is laying waste to everything so what’s the use? What can we even?
It works retroactively, too, because Trump is undoing every single thing Obama did.
It also projects into the future, because we have a pattern here: the Republicans keep putting worse and worse malevolent idiots into the White House. Reagan, Bush Junior, Trump – what future can there even be?
Reagan, Bush Junior, Trump, _________? Yeah. I’ve been wondering about that series, too.
One thing that would obviously be worse is a Trumpian Turd but with more intelligence.
Hard to even imagine, but no doubt they’re out there. So I guess that’s next. Unless, of course, we get our act together, overwhelm the vote rigging with registrations and turnout, kill gerrymandering and the Electoral College, and rescind all the Orange Usurper’s illegitimate lifelong judicial appointments. (I feel hysterical laughter coming on.)
I was reminded of the following panel from the Women in Secularism 2 conference in 2013 (seems like a lifetime ago now, doesn’t it…):
https://youtu.be/mV-PtROH4Mk
Back then Katha Pollitt came through as the greatest optimist on the panel, while Susan Jacoby almost seemed to sense what was coming from miles away. As another pessimist like Jacoby, I too find no pleasure in seeing hope dashed.
(BTW, iknklast, if you’re reading this and haven’t watched the panel before, there’s a brief exchange over the “millennials are going to fix everything” argument that you might find interesting.)
Parallels. As I’ve noted before, you could say almost exactly the same things with regard to living in Brexit Britain.
Indeed, Trump made me realize I never actually felt hopeless before. Now my hopes, if not utterly dashed, are limited to very simple things like those batman DVDs
Quixote:
Actually, he’s already in there. As Vice President. A heartbeat away, as they say. And Trump is 70 years old, morbidly obese, and loves him some steak and beautiful chocolate cake. He could kick off with a massive heart attack or stroke tomorrow. Then it’s hail to the Theocrat-in-Chief.
We’re working on the gerrymandering problem here in Michigan. We’re well on the way to getting an amendment to the state Constitution on the 2018 ballot to put an independent citizens’ commission in charge of drawing districts. We need a bit over 315,000 validated signatures; we have about 412,000 raw sigs as of this morning. Even got a story in the Graun. votersnotpoliticians.com