Another Dreadful Day In The Age of Trump

The soundtrack to my life today

I remember the feeling of fear and hopelessness I felt the morning after Trump's election quite vividly. There was a sense that everything was spinning out of control, that the future was both unknown and frightening. In the aftermath of the election I threw myself into political action as a way to guard against that day.

However, there are always days when those efforts melt away, when I feel completely powerless to do anything, and hopeless that there is any way that things will get better. The day I heard about family separations was one of those days, as was the day Trump cancelled DACA. These are the days that when I must face the reality that a completely bigoted, corrupt, capricious, would be tyrant has a tremendous amount of power to subject others to his cruel will. 

I've been trying to come up with a name for these days, so that all of us in opposition can have a language to share our feelings with. I could call it a "malignant reality day" in honor of my friend Chauncey DeVega, but I don't want to steal his phrase. I think I will call these days "dread" days, since dread is an emotion I feel most acutely in the age of Trump.

Today is a dread day because it has brought the news that the Supreme Court has allowed Trump's ban on transgender soldiers to stay in place. The Supreme Court seat that was robbed yet again reveals its awful potential to hurt people and take away their rights. We can probably expect more of the same in coming years. 

Today is also the day when the news media displayed its utter and complete failure. It is treating the smug boys who taunted Nathan Phillips as the wronged party. So desperate not to be accused of bias, the media is responding to the awful day to day manifestation of the hate that is endorsed from on high by shielding whiteness. The white supremacy that Trump represents in its most craven and vulgar form is getting an excuse from editors and producers who are upholding the racial order in subtler ways. To top it off, Trump will be inviting those boys to the White House, celebrating the kinds of kids who have been taunting and harassing the same victims as him, and much more intimately. 

As far as the shutdown goes, it seems like the last election is meaningless. It drags on, the Republicans safe behind their gerrymandered walls, the president unwilling to compromise. I get the feeling that Democrats are going to give in to the hostage taking. What came before is a horror, what lies ahead is worse. And yet where are the protests? Where is the action? I only see stasis, paralysis, and cowardice. I so desperately want to mount the barricades, but there aren't any, and no one is leading the way. I fear the dreadful days are about to happen with greater frequency.

The Fear And America's Default Setting

I have a dose of the The Fear tonight like none I've ever had since perhaps the day after the 2016 election. I cannot get the knowledge that children are being ripped from their families and jailed for the crime of seeking asylum out of my head. Every single waking breathing moment I have is totally suffused with it.

It was bad enough earlier today, but then I decided to listen to that ProPublica audio and I completely lost it. My two daughters are almost six years old, and the six year old Salvadoran girl who kept repeating her aunt's phone number has a voice very much like one of my daughters. I could imagine her in that moment, confident that she could get out if she could just get the big people to understand her.

As others have pointed out, this kind of thing is not new in American life. Today's carnival of lies by DHS Secretary Nielsen reminded me of a propaganda film the government put out in 1943 to tell everyone that Japanese internment was necessary to protect the nation from saboteurs in their ranks. It also said not to worry, the internees were being treated well, as their smiling faces were supposed to attest.

Nielsen proclaimed that the kids were being treated kindly, and that this whole thing was necessary to uphold the law and to stop MS-13 and terrorists, instead of "saboteurs."

I am also reminded of many narratives by former slaves who discussed the practice of children being sold away from their mothers. Solomon Northrup's description of a boy being taken from his mother at the slave market in New Orleans brings tears to my eyes:

"The same man also purchased Randall. The little fellow was made to jump, and run across the floor, and perform many other feats, exhibiting his activity and condition. All the time the trade was going on, Eliza was crying aloud, and wringing her hands. She besought the man not to buy him, unless he also bought her self and Emily. She promised, in that case, to be the most faithful slave that ever lived. The man answered that he could not afford it, and then Eliza burst into a paroxysm of grief, weeping plaintively. Freeman turned round to her, savagely, with his whip in his uplifted hand, ordering her to stop her noise, or he would flog her. He would not have such work - such snivelling; and unless she ceased that minute, he would take her to the yard and give her a hundred lashes. Yes, he would take the nonsense out of her pretty quick - if he didn’t, might he be d—d. Eliza shrunk before him, and tried to wipe away her tears, but it was all in vain. She wanted to be with her children, she said, the little time she had to live. All the frowns and threats of Freeman, could not wholly silence the afflicted mother. She kept on begging and beseeching them, most piteously not to separate the three. Over and over again she told them how she loved her boy. A great many times she repeated her former promises - how very faithful and obedient she would be; how hard she would labor day and night, to the last moment of her life, if he would only buy them all together. But it was of no avail; the man could not afford it. The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall must go alone. Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her - all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.
Freeman damned her, calling her a blubbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place, and behave herself; and be somebody. He swore he wouldn’t stand such stuff but a little longer. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.
The planter from Baton Rouge, with his new purchases, was ready to depart.
“Don’t cry, mama. I will be a good boy. Don’t cry,” said Randall, looking back, as they passed out of the door.
What has become of the lad, God knows. It was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared."

 This scene, of a mother crying as her child is taken away from her, is being replayed many times a day on the border as we live and breathe.

In many respects, we are seeing America return to its default setting. This nation has its origins in settler colonialism, which gave birth to a form of Herrenvolk nationalism. Until 1965, citizenship in this country was still by law dependent on race. The Voting Rights Act and Immigration Act helped change that, but that was not so long ago. Deep down, most white people (including white liberals) do not care enough about the fate of brown-skinned immigrant children to do something on their behalf. I have pledged to fight, but I am not confident that there will be victory.

Get Ready To Head Into The Fire

Two weeks before inauguration I wrote probably my most pessimistic piece for this blog: "Into The Fire":

"In a little over two weeks, Donald J Trump will be the next president of the United States, and I fear that we don't stand a chance. In conversations I've had with those who voted for Trump, both online and in person, they simply do not have any concerns or reservations about what this man has done or anything he is about to do. In most cases they are people who want their version of America to triumph, and that's a version where gays are in the closet, immigrants deported, bosses control their workers, people of color are invisible, and women are in the kitchen. If Trump has to break a few laws and break a few heads for that to happen, they simply do not care."

I stand by that because Republicans have stood by him. His corruption, unstable behavior with nukes, and championing of Nazis has not swayed them, which means that nothing will. As long as the Republicans control Congress, his agenda will win, and due to suppression, gerrymandering, and Democratic ineptitude, I will bet money it will continue after next November.

Right now, though, it looks like we are headed into the center of the fire. The Trump administration is intentionally destroying Obamacare, after being unable to pass new legislation. The Iran agreement is about to be torn up. And today, the president joked about the possibility of a coming nuclear war with North Korea. He called this "the calm before the storm," which means that he is planning on unleashing a storm. 

After being unable to get a legislative win, and after he has been losing advisors and cabinet members left and right, this famously impetuous and lonely man is deciding to go it alone, without any annoying restraints. He is psychologically tormented by the need to "win," and he will do whatever he can to get those "wins." He burning desire to destroy anything built by Obama means he will trash the health care marketplaces and tear up the treaties that his predecessor signed. Perhaps he will get his "win" by starting and winning a war. Isn't that the ultimate presidential "win"?

Things have been bad. They are about to get a lot worse. I want you to ask a question: what am I going to DO about it? That's a question not enough people have been asking.

Fear Is The Mind Killer

Hunter S Thompson was a prophet

The day after the election was bad, but Inauguration Day was worse. Apart from friends and family dying and 9/11, I can't think of a day where I felt greater despair. I sat up late, drinking Old Grandad straight while watching The Big Lebowski, my ultimate pickup movie. The next day, the Women's March happened, and it became obvious that the new president was not going to get a honeymoon, and that those of us who oppose him already greatly outnumbered his supporters. Since that day, despite all the horrors, I have had a fighting spirit. I have been to many protests, made innumerable phone calls, organized teach-ins, and written reams of blog posts (not that they matter much.)

Yesterday, for the first time in months, the old Fear came shooting right back. I think this week is a turning point. With his speeches yesterday and today, it is clear that Trump has gone back into full-on racist demagogue mode. He is no longer masking his authoritarian longings, and seems poised to fire his attorney general so that he can quash an investigation into his criminal behavior. On top of that, the Republicans in Congress are so desperate and craven to take away the health care of tens of millions of people that they wheeled in an ailing John McCain to get the motion to proceed over the line. This was a motion to proceed on a bill whose contents were still unknown, making a mockery of the legislative process.

Conservatives, who fancy themselves the "real Americans" and people like me to be anti-American, have followed the logic of this stance to its inevitable conclusion: the ends justify the means. It is honestly not hard to be fearful, under the circumstances.

But fear does no one any good. As said in Dune (my favorite sci-fi novel) "fear is the mind killer." I am vowing tonight to maintain my fighting spirit, with the full knowledge that some major setbacks are about to happen. Battles will be lost, but failure to win the war is not an option. To sit by and not fight it, even against long odds, is something that any good-hearted person should be ashamed of.

Republic Of Fear (Redux)

We are a nation governed by fear. I try to resist it, but I too can get dragged down into its morass. Yesterday I was out and about with my family, and we decided to stop into a mall to kill some time before an event we were attending was starting. Why a mall? Because of the indoor play area, which is a perfect place to take toddlers if you want them to run around while getting out of the sun. There was a boy with a toy gun there who kept shooting it at other kids, something I would barely have noticed in my childhood, but which filled my with almost unbearable anxiety and dread. All the news of mass shootings had clearly had an effect on me.

Soon after that I heard reports of a pipe bomb that had been planted near the finish line of a run in New Jersey, which was thankfully discovered before it exploded. Later that day came the explosion in Chelsea. Soon on my social media feed the massive reservoir of fearful magma beneath America came bursting forth in the hot lava. And, of course, before hardly anything was known, Trump was trying to exploit it.

Fear has historically been a powerful force in American political history, but since 9/11, it has been given a massive steroid injection. Historically, this fear usually means rights are taken away, and people die. Fear of Native Americans led to the Trail of Tears, fear of white supremacy being compromised contributing to lynchings, fear of communism destroyed the lives of those targeted, fear of poor young people of color resulted in mass incarceration. The list goes on. The fear spiral in our case has lasted so long because politicians have failed so spectacularly to deliver a better world, and so must instead base their legitimacy on "protecting" the public from violence. (That's the thesis of the BBC's amazing The Power of Nightmares, which I consider to be the most important documentary of the post-9/11 world.)

Donald Trump has been so successful because he is the fear candidate. He has perfectly channeled the fears of white middle America, from a fear of Muslims to fears of African Americans, to fears of immigration, and to fears of national decline. He appeals to the white people who live in suburbs founded and based in fear, from their segregated housing to the local police forces who pull over any black people who dare surpass its borders. He certainly must have remembered how back in 2003 Dubya managed to use that fear to get broad public support for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

And in the midst of this orgy of fear, others are given much more to fear. Muslims have to fear being targeted by a growing wave of hate crimes. African Americans have to fear being murdered by the police in the routine course of their daily lives. Immigrants have to fear deportation or having their families ripped apart.

I do not see any horizon for the Republic of Fear. That too fills me with fear, because I am not sure how long a society can function or even exist in a state like this.

The Link Between Snowstorm Preparation and the "War on Terror"

Living here in New Jersey, I was prepared for the worst yesterday.  During my commute the snow was coming down really hard, and the train was so full that all the seats were filled and I stood in the aisle packed cheek to jowl with my fellow commuters.  The only other time I experienced this was in the aftermath of Sandy, when trains ran infrequently.  My wife didn't want to venture out with the kids in the snow, so I ended up walking about two miles home from the train station.  The snow wasn't fearsome, but I thought that if it was just the beginning, the night would be horrible.

It turns out that I had already experienced the worst of it.  It all ended up being a heavy snow, pretty nasty and inconvenient, but hardly the "historic blizzard" we'd been led to expect.  Despite that fact, all mass transit had been shut down and states of emergency declared.  You could say that this overreaction resulted from the storm changing its path, or a bad weather prediction, but I don't.  The stringent, top-down measures are also rooted in our country's mentality after 9/11.

When I was younger I can't remember snow storms getting this much pre-game hype, or extensive and drastic measures being taken BEFORE it was apparent what the storm was bringing.  Having grown up in Nebraska, I know from blizzards, but they usually didn't close the interstate down in the windswept western areas of the state until it was apparent that the roads were impassable.  Yesterday four states declared states of emergency before the storm even hit.  While I was on the train ride home yesterday I was told that trains would not running until Thursday, (they're already back now.)

Those actions reflect a tendency today by political leaders in this country to quickly take state action whenever there's a whiff of any kind of threat or crisis.  They do it because it enhances their power, and also because the public has been inured to accepting emergency measures.  Both come from the "War on Terror."  In the case of politicians, they can't fail to have noticed how 9/11 saved George W. Bush's presidency, which started off with questionable legitimacy and responded to an economic downturn with tax cuts for the rich.  (Of course, his poor handling of the Katrina disaster showed how not responding to a crisis well can kill a political career.)  Chris Christie was paying attention, and he parlayed Sandy into a positive public profile at a time when his popularity in New Jersey was slipping.  He used that event to create an image of a tough-talking leader in charge, and one able to reach across the partisan divide to cooperate with a Democratic president.  Disasters are great for executive leaders in that they get to look responsible, criticism of them becomes de facto bad, and they can wield much more power than in regular times.  When we hear news of drone strikes and NSA spying that should hardly surprise us.

As far as the people are concerned, they have been conditioned to accept greater authoritarian measures.  We take our shoes off at the airport, accept NSA spying despite Edward Snowden's revelations, and punish anyone at the polls who dares to challenge the PATRIOT Act for being "soft on terror."As I have written before, we are a society ruled by fear.  This fear now apparently extends to the weather, where a snowstorm or blizzard becomes "Snowmageddon" or somesuch thing.  Of course the media play a big role in this, mostly because they've realized that the public craves fear, from the bogus "knock out game" to hyping up weather events.

Others may see a bad weather forecast to blame for the overreaction to snow in the New York City area, I see the fear spiral at work once again.  At least this time it was fairly harmless, but I'm sure it will be used to gin up more wars, domestic and foreign, in the future.

A Footnote on Suburban Fear

It seems like I'm not the only person out there thinking about the power of fear and its connect to suburban living spaces this week.  Today Sarah Kendzior and Umar Lee published a brilliant article on the dynamics of fear in Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area.  They interview many local residents, who are more than happy to cop to their racialized fears and their support of Darren Wilson.  This piece is essential reading.

America's suburbanization is a disastrously failed experiment of massive proportions.  The sprawl contributes to our environmental problems, social atomization, and racial segregation and inequality.  And yet it won't of away, and I now find myself complicit in it as a suburb dweller, mostly because the city I work in (NYC) has become prohibitively expensive.  It is time for progressive-minded suburbanites to push for change in this environment, to challenge segregation and the attitude that feeds it, namely that suburbanites refuse to believe that they share a common fate with urbanites.  If that mental wall can be torn down, maybe some real progress can be made.

Suburbia Is America's Fear Factory

I've been writing a lot about fear these last weeks because the panic over Ebola has demonstrated fear's massive and destructive power in this country.  Fear is what got the PATRIOT Act passed after 9/11.  Fear makes the people of this country accept unprecedented intrusions into their privacy.  Fear has long been one of the most potent factors in the continuation of white supremacy.

Fear's roots run deep and are evident in the most mundane structures of our daily lives.  Nowhere is this more visible than in the vast, endless sprawl of American suburbia, America's fear factory.  Of course, suburban America is hardly monochromatic today, and many suburbs (like the one where I reside) can be racially diverse and relatively open-minded.  However, this is not the case with broad swaths of the sprawl, either here in New Jersey or elsewhere.  For example, I've heard tell of multiple denizens of sprawlville saying that they were putting off trips to New York City because they were afraid of ISIS attacks.  In the very safe and quiet suburb where she works there are people who live in fortress-like gated communities with the belief that the leafy suburban streets are too mean for their tastes.  Back when I lived in Newark and encountered people who lived in sprawlville their faces would scrunch in barely disguised disgust when I told them I lived in Newark.  When I told them I liked it there, they looked like they thought I was deranged.

Those anecdotes are hardly surprising, since suburbia was founded in fear.  Fear of the "other," fear of "them," fear of urban ways of living.  In some cases, like on Eight Mile Road in Detroit, suburbia meant the building of literal walls to keep out the people of color whom whites had taken flight from.  On streets that border Newark in my current town of Maplewood, residents blocked them off, ostensibly to prevent speeding cars taking them as a shortcut, but I wonder.  There's a suburban town where some of my wife's relatives live that's overwhelmingly white, but most of the times I see the cops pulling someone over, the drivers of the cars are African American.

American suburbanites are experts in finding new things to be afraid of.  In the 1980s and 1990s, it was the idea that going to the city meant risking having your ankle tendons slashed by gang members hiding beneath your car.  (This one was widespread in Nebraska when I was young, supposedly it was a common gang initiation.)  Nowadays I hear residents of sprawlville speak fearfully of the much hyped "knockout game."  In the 1970s and 1980s it was the bogus fear of strangers tampering with Halloween candy.  In suburbia no one can be trusted, everything outside of everyone's little castle is a potential threat to fear.  The fear is pervasive and never-ending, built into the very DNA of the place.

A majority of Americans live in suburbs.  While not all of those people live in suburbs according to the stereotype of them as white, middle-class autotopias a la Nassau County, a very large contingent do.  Is it any surprise that we are a country ruled by fear when such a large number of its citizens live in communities whose very raison d'etre is fear itself?

Republic of Fear

Back in 2004, at the height of the American war in Iraq, the BBC aired a stunning three-part documentary series called The Power of Nightmares.  It told the parallel stories of neo-conservatives and radical Islamists, arguing that both turned fear and the collapse of the liberal project into powerful support for their extreme violence.  I saw it the next year in the aftermath of the re-election of George W Bush, an event that today seems completely inexplicable.  At the time, however, it was easy to see that Bush and his handlers had skillfully exploited America's post-9/11 fear and hate.  The point about America's insatiable fear also came across in Bowling for Columbine, which while about gun control had one of its most powerful moments in showing how a constant drumbeat of fear by the television media to shock viewers into tuning in became all-consuming after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

In the past few years I have let myself forget the potency of fear in this country.  According to a recent Times article, conservatives have not forgotten, and are running political ads blaming Ebola and ISIS on the president.

This is a nation that exudes fear and paranoia, from anti-vaccers who refuse to innoculate their children to "doomsday preppers" expecting the apocalypse.  White people are drilled from day one in their lives to fear black people as some kind of dangerous, criminal other, which has had murderous consequences from Ferguson to Fruitvale Station.  Since the election of Barack Obama his conservative opponents have exploited the fears of his most bigoted detractors.  Expanded health insurance, for example, became a genocidal vehicle for "death panels" in the Tea Party imagination.
The response to the Ebola virus this week has been most telling.  The infection of one person in Texas has led to unhinged panic and conspiracy theories that is somehow has something to do with refugee children from Central America or a plot by Barack Obama to Africanize the country.  (The latter bit of nonsense comes straight from the mouth of hate-crone Phyllis Schlafly.)

Our republic of fear has birthed two destructive, open-ended conflicts still ruining lives, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.  Since the panics over crack in the 1980s we have been incarcerating our nation's population on a truly staggering level.  This same War on Drugs has given the police ridiculous power to confiscate property and ruin lives without due process.  To fight the terrorist bogeyman, the public is told they must allow the government to secretly tap our phones, look at our email, and scan our bodies at the airport.  For the most part, the public has acquiesced, despite the occasional complaint.

Political reactionaries with an authoritarian bent will continue to prosper, since fear is the fuel that they live on.  The United States will never be able to progress and improve from its appalling state unless it gives up its addiction to fear.  I can't say that I'm optimistic that it will happen.