Phoning it In

It’s been two years, almost, since this nightmare started, and let’s face it—we’re all exhausted.

 

Trump has exhausted us all, just as badly as a drunk in the family can unnerve absolutely everyone around him, even the pool boy. I knew how bad this was going to be back in 2015—about a day after Trump got off the escalator (I had ignored him until then—ah, bliss!)

 

A ten-year nightmare, as I watched every august but toothless institution just crumple in the face of what should have been a paper tiger. The ultimate queen of the political shit storm that we’ve been enduring is Senator Susan Collins—whose ineffectual “tsk-tsk” to Trump was heard, and ignored, around the world. The Supreme Court says no to Trump and he does it anyway—from deporting American citizens to filling our street with the army / National Guard, to imposing illegal tariffs, to starting an illegal war and finally—and hopefully fatally—to being so inept and corrupt that nobody can stand him.

 

I am hating the United States.

 

I love the United States.

 

Both are true.

 

Also true about phoning it in—since I had one goal in mind when Trump called me back to the keyboard on January 20, 2025. I was supposed to answer one question: what had happened to the country on my watch?

 

My grandmother had left a little memoir with who we were (as she imagined it) and what we had done with ourselves since we got off the Golden Whelp (or whatever it was that followed the Mayflower, which of course we missed). When she wrote it, in the 1970’s, she was horrified, to some degree, by what she saw around her.   

 

I dismissed it as the predictable horror of the old, who always feel things are going to hell. Whatever else it was in the 1970’s, the United States was a stable democracy with a clean government and a healthy society governed by the rule of law. We grumbled, but we were rich.

 

We disagreed, but did not hate.

 

So Gram (my name for Ruth Herrick Myers) had written (glancingly) about the witch-hanging ancestor in Salem 1680 and the grandfather who had “deserted” the family shortly after the Civil War and the eccentric uncles who had taught in Constantinople and written biographies of Abe Lincoln in Turkish.

 

Gram and her companions had given us a perfectly good country—and what the hell had we done with it!

 

My job was to write it all down, and maybe I did—for what it’s worth.

 

The one problem Notes Awaiting a Grad Student (my current name for the five hundred pages I blogged last year) DOESN’T have is length. Structure, coherence, over-arching vision, consistency of tone (well, outrage was never in short supply…)?

 

…err….

 

I should have answered the question that my grandmother would have truly been horrified to have to ask.

 

How did the Soviet Union fall and yet still win?

 

How did they do it, without firing a single shot?

 

I’m supposed to be able to answer that question in a single sentence—even before I sit down to write the first page of the book.

 

Let’s try to do it in a paragraph.

 

Putin won without firing a shot because we had become the least educated, most complacent, most arrogant and entitled generation in our history. We lost any knowledge of our past, any appreciation for how our system of government works, and any vision for our future. Our schools exist only for mass gunmen to use as target practice. Our society has become tribalized over cultural issues. Christianity has either been abandoned or has transformed itself in Christian Nationalism. It was easy to get a smug, complacent, and utterly ignorant people (most of whom had been home-schooled) to fall for a con man.

 

It was easy to find the con man—Trump—who could whip up the resentment and anger. It was easy to whisper into his ear the riches that would be Trump’s if he toppled any order anywhere and sowed chaos here and abroad. It was easy to propose getting rid of the pesky little countries like Mexico, Greenland, Iran, all of Europe (basically) and having just three or four enormous countries: The United States and the Americas, Russia and Europe, China and South East Asia / Oceana.

 

Vast areas controlled by just a handful of men.

 

Men with a single, coherent vision for the future.

 

Men without scruples, but with a lot of money.

 

Get the people to hate, get ‘em to vote, and get rich.

 

We did it to ourselves—I’ll have to tell my grandmother.

 

And in a week, we’ll see what we’re made of. There’s the midterms, next week, and there are only two certainties:

 

The Republicans will lose, assuming a fair election.

 

Trump will try to overturn the election, since he hasn’t managed to throw it in his direction.

 

There will be chaos.

 

There—I phoned it in!

    

Eros versus Thanatos

‘I should write, I should write,’ since I have to justify what is simply unspeakable: I cannot keep my eyes’ off the ruins of American democracy, any more than I can keep from rubber-necking a fatal car crash.

 

In fact, I’m over it, and I’m over the country I still love, but can no longer care about.

 

Yeah—it’s gotten that bad. I know that you can still love something you no longer care about. You love it because you’re human. You no longer care about it…well, because you’re human. And being human, for me, means that at a certain point, I have to disengage. I lived with an alcoholic, I loved him, I left him.

 

He made choices I thought were wrong. 

 

So did the country.

 

He’s happy with the choices.

 

So are we, or rather, now…

 

…they.

 

Which is not to say that Trump is popular—but who cares? They hate him now because gas prices are high, food prices are high, the Canada tariff-war is jacking up the price of hamburgers—as well as car parts.

 

They don’t hate him because of the corruption, the complete betrayal of the US constitution, or even because he’s just a completely loathsome individual. They love the loathsome. Hate is enduringly sweet.

 

I assumed somebody would find an off-ramp, and speed onto it. The dementia could not be clearer. Later generations will be screaming at us: HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE IT!!!!??? The Germans will get a complete pass for Hitler and World War II.

 

It’s gonna be a hard meeting, that postmortem encounter with my grandmother. Because it’s not just the educational system that completely failed, in the half century since my grandmother died. Forget not reading Virgil: nobody not collecting an old-age pension has any idea of what Civics is.

 

Civics was the quaint idea that a society that was going to govern itself needed rules and structures, and that participants in the game of democracy needed to know the rules of the game. It’s why I scream, “BUT THE SUPREME COURT OVER-RULED THE TARIFFS!!” at the television, when Trump re-re-re-re-re-reimposed the tariffs on Canada. 

 

I am screaming, but no one else is, and that’s because nobody knows the rules and nobody cares about the rules. What IS important is somebody named Taylor Swift—who sings, or people think she does. Or maybe she acts. I don’t know because it’s not important, and you won’t know because she’s not important. But we’re sitting down here obsessed with what she is or isn’t doing, which is more important than public policy or the future of our beloved country.

 

No one gives a shit, really, because nobody knows enough to give a shit. Just keep the gas cheap and the fast-food flowing.

 

So it’s a problem that nobody knows the rules of the game we’re supposed to be playing. It’s also a problem that nobody attaches any importance to the game we’re playing. We are spectacularly spoiled: we have forgotten (indeed, most of us never knew) how freaking important freedom is. Seeing American troops policing American cities has become the norm—pretty soon, we’ll be thanking them for the “service,” as they continue to deport anybody brown (US citizen or not) to the concentration camps that we’re ignoring.

 

That—I would have to tell my grandmother—is the worst of all. It is not that democracy is fragile—Venetian glass enlightening a city. It is that Philistines drifted in first, and then the haters.

 

Not just the haters of the usual (imagined) sins or sinners: the gays, the political left, the freedom-of-choice women, the atheists. Robertson Davies, in one of his novels, talks about the Eros-people and the Thanatos-people. Some people embrace life—the craziness, the unpredictable, the unregulated. Some people embrace death: the ordered, sterile, filed. 

 

MAGA and Trump attract the Thanatos-people. They’re not just living in the darkness, they’re actively spreading it. They seek light and smother it. They see tradition or decency, and the slime oozes from them, reflexively, and covers all. Whatever was good in American society has been squelched. 

 

I loved the country.

I no longer love my countrymen.   

 

 

Clinging to Sanity

I’m writing because I have to, fully aware that no one will read it, and that the words will hardly comfort me. Writing is held to be therapeutic, but at this point it feels neurotic.

 

The idea was simple: my grandmother had written, sometime in the 1970’s, an account of her (our / my) family. She touched on the subject of the Salem Witch Trials, spoke of her ardent-abolitionist mother and grandmother, told the story of her uncle’s death in a Civil War prison and of how her grandfather had to retrieve the body. The same grandfather “deserted” the family to find gold in a place and a time where there didn’t seem to be much gold—or indeed any gold—at all. She wrote Me and Mine in the 70's, to tell us who we are and who we had been. My job, writing in the last year, has been to update the story--as we lived through the most traumatic upheavals in American history.

 

In her childhood, my grandmother had lived with “Prince,” the horse that pulled the family carriage. In the last years of her life, she watched as men stepped foot on the moon for the first time. She had lived, she felt, through remarkable times.

 

I was with her, the night we watched that moon landing. It was astonishing to her, as it was to me, and we both went outside, during a commercial break, and gazed up at the moon. There were guys up there—Americans, of course.

 

Our guys.

 

She had seen the March on Washington and had heard the crowds singing, “We Shall Overcome.” She had seen women first get the vote and then become lawmakers, judges, doctors. She had seen (and been horrified by) the “sexual revolution,” of the sixties. She marveled at how vastly her country had changed.

 

Had it?

 

If she were to see it, today—what would she see?

 

Worse—what would I say to her, in the afterlife? 

 

How would I account for myself? She would be horrified, I think, to know that I was gay (her word would be “homosexual.”) Even worse, I suspect, that I had spent years of my life as a drunk—and my ten years of subsequent sobriety would count for something, but by no means get me off the hook.  

 

And how would I account for what had happened to her country—about which she was deeply proud, in a matter-of-fact way. She exemplified American Exceptionalism—the belief that we were special because we were sensible, hardworking, and fulfilling inevitably God’s plan for us. God’s plan for us was to be the best nation on earth and in history—and thus a beacon for all the rest of the beleaguered world.

 

I would have to tell her that her fellow citizens, nowadays, are the fattest, most addicted, least educated people on earth.

 

She learned Latin in High School, and assumed that translating ten lines of Virgil daily would always be a part of every student’s life. Now, her great grand-daughter (my niece) has no idea what the perfect tenses are. No big deal—except that my niece’s job is to train other people to be English teachers. The fact that my niece knows no grammar bothers no one but me.

 

Nobody knows much of anything, really, but presumably they feel good about themselves, which is the point of modern education. 

 

Am I being unfair?

 

Probably, but the underlying assumption about education of my grandmother’s generation was that children are savages, though correctible. A child’s mind was to be filled up as much and as quickly with information and ways of thinking that would serve them and the society around them for the rest of their lives. Of course Virgil would be forgotten—that wasn’t the point. Running a 10 KM race is just as pointless—if all you wanted was to go from one point to another. The race challenges the mind, spirit, and body of the runner. Virgil does just the same.

 

My son had no idea who won the Civil War, until I met him and told him. Even worse, he voted for Trump, whom everyone in my grandmother’s generation would have known was fit only for an orange jumpsuit and heavily supervised settings. The guy lost an election and started an insurrection—of course he should be behind bars.

 

How did he ever get there in the first place?

 

What in the world have our schools been doing?

 

I am a product of the “stuff the savage’s mind full of information until it bursts” method of education. I cannot tell you, now, what the five principal exports of Brazil are, or when Simón Bolívar’s date of birth is. I am as ignorant of this stuff as is my son or my niece—and what possible benefit was it to have learned it all up and forgotten it after the test?

 

I can Google, and I do.

 

But at times I wonder if I am one of the few people left who can use Google right. It’s a tool, and a powerful tool. My telephone can recite Virgil in Latin, then translate it into English, if I like, or Swahili, if needed. Google can answer every question, but not the meta-questions:

 

1.    What do I know?

2.    What do I need to know?

3.    Why do I think I need to know it?

4.    What source can I trust, and why have I decided to trust it?

5.    What are my biases?

6.    What do I not know, and is it important?

 

To which might be added….

 

7.    Who’s Virgil, anyway? 

 

My darkest suspicion has been that school’s have gone from fact-stuffing factories to instruments of social change and validation of the students’ lifestyle and personal experience. My niece has no knowledge of the pluperfect, but she is an expert and finding and exposing students to text that will illuminate and delineate the student’s world and views of life. When she hears “Black English,” she hears this, since I have now Googled “Black English…..”

 

  

 

Yeah?

 

My grandmother heard double negatives, incorrect usage of archaic words, jumbled tenses, prepositions stranded at the end of sentences, and split infinitives. All of which might be really appropriate, in a brawl following a night of pubs and drinking. But definitely not the language you want to employ, if you have to argue in front of the Supreme Court, the next day.

 

My grandmother, as well, would have been horrified at the idea of “home schooling,” since she would have seen the split it inevitably would produce that the rest of us could not. Her “intrusive” method of education was to banish superstition (the wrong sort) and to impose an accepted version of reality. We were products of an assembly line, she might freely have admitted. But by the time we had been pushed off the assembly line and deposited at graduation, we had the same information, the same beliefs, the same ways of thinking and seeing the world as everyone else. We had been ”prepared” for life, not validated.

 

We made value judgments that very easily could descend to prejudice. Pop music was fine for the beach or the car—serious people listened to Bach and Mozart. Doctors were gods, and if they put drops of silver nitrate into your newborn’s eyes—well, they must know what they’re doing. Politicians lied if they could, but it was unthinkable for them to swear in public.

 

Things have gone to hell in that handbasket, I would have to tell my grandmother. American education is now the joke of the world.

 

And that’s just the beginning!

Unhinged

Not my word for it, but Heather Cox Richardson’s.

 

Nor was it an “it” that Richardson was describing, but rather that always-present him—Donald Trump. The fact that a respected scholar and the quintessential measured voice has no other word for the president of the United States (and formerly leader of the free world—remember that?) was jarring. That she thinks it will get worse is horrifying, but inescapably true.

 

Before I tell you about Richardson, let’s just outline what’s going on in the world today, 15 July 2026.

 

1.    The war in Iran continues, as it has for the last 4 or 5 months, despite the alleged “Memo of Understanding, (MOU)” that was to lead to peace talks last month. In fact, a couple of days ago, the president said the MOU was kaput, Iran is controlling the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is bombing Iran cities and infrastructure, and has just submitted a second notification to Congress, as required under the War Powers Act. The war violates all international law, and…

2.    …so there is now a push to eliminate the World Court by Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State. Smart move, since everyone who is complicit with Trump will be investigated, if any sort of normalcy returns to the world.

3.    ICE continues to kill people in traffic stops—this time a guy in Houston and a legal immigrant from Colombia in Biddeford, Maine. Maine happens to be where the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee (which funds ICE), Susan Collins, lives and (putatively) represents. The last anybody saw of Collins, she was being roasted in a ribbon-cutting ceremony by her constituents, who were shouting “SHAME!” constantly. She is a disgrace to the seat she holds, which once graced Margaret Chase Smith.

4.    ICE is now claiming that the Maine shooting was necessary, since the agent claimed that the Colombian guy had “weaponized his vehicle,” and the agent feared for public safety. 

5.    (Translation of item 4 for those unversed in Totalitarianism: driving a car if you’re brown is illegal, since you are dangerous by birth and will turn your car into a speeding behemoth plunging into a crowd. For that reason, you have to be sent to a…

6.    … concentration camp, of which we have over 200. These are almost always built by the prison “industry,” which tend to be controlled by rich guys who like Trump. They should—he’s providing a wonderful income stream from poor immigrants who have NO access to the US court system, who can be detained indefinitely in subhuman conditions, and have essentially been “disappeared.” Richardson, by the way, foresaw the pearl-clutching that would follow her use of the word “concentration camp,” by crisply pointing out that the term simply meant a place where people are concentrated. It’s one step down from an extermination camp, if that’s any consolation. That, along with the fact that…

7.    …we are only in authoritarianism, not totalitarianism (fortunately, I don’t have to capitalize these awful words). Good news, maybe—in authoritarianism, I just have to do what the Dear Leader says, I don’t have to believe it. In totalitarianism, I have to believe that…

8.    …the 2020 election was stolen! Yes, and Trump has new “evidence” to prove it, which he will reveal tomorrow night in a major address to the nation. Fortunately, he has the SAVE act, which will effectively make it impossible for married women and trans people to vote. Which means that the mid-term elections in less than four months are in real jeopardy, since there is no way that Trump could win legitimately. So we have that to worry about, as well as the fact that…

9.    …we have run through our reserves of oil, which was the only thing that has kept gas prices from truly skyrocketing, in the way that German inflation was out of control just before World War II. That, and who knew that…

10.…25% of the fertilizer we need to grow the “food” that we eat comes through the Strait of Hormuz. So what food there is is gonna be very expensive, though none of us need to worry, since…

11.…the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C., has been drained, once again, and will be painted with the same stuff by the same company that made the original mess under a highly profitable and non-public contract. A third of the White House is gone, the south lawn is still ripped up after Trump’s July 4^th event, the All-American State Fair was an utter failure, and it’s clear that we will be suffering the inevitable…

12.…corruption and shoddy work that comes from an authoritarian ruler. The only question is whether it’s a good thing or a bad, this inability to run even the Roman Circus in some reasonable manner. But honestly, can any distraction disrupt the true corruption, which is…

13.…that Trump and his family have engorged themselves with real estate deals in the Middle East, cryptocurrency deals, market manipulation by timing sales / buys to current events. Good to know he can do it, since nothing else about Trump suggests that he’s at all cogent or thinking linearly. He’s falling asleep everywhere, staying up all night reposting deeply-worrisome nonsense on “Truth Social,” unable to recognize world leaders or to get himself seated in the right delegation of G7 leaders. Which means that…

14.  …we’re right back to the Nixon years, when our president was getting sloshed every night, abusing his wife physically and emotionally, and stumbling through the White House delivering maudlin, drunken speeches / excuses in front of the oil portraits of his predecessors. Pat Nixon, presumably, was asleep in bed at the time, but who knows where Melania (Trump’s wife) is, since she only drops in when she has to (birthdays, Fourth of July, etc.) This means that Trump is completely nuts, deteriorating fast, and nobody is around to monitor, much less stop, him. Not that Melania may be the best choice, since…

15. …look, I hate to shame the victim, even if the victim has done very, very well for herself. Melania was a beautiful girl from a repressive and poor country who came to the US and was one of the “models” surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t know what she did, or had to do, to survive—but the “artful” pornography of seeing her in handcuffs and half naked in Trump’s private jet told the story. She’s not a lady you take home to mother, or at least to my mother, who would be horrified to know…

16. …that the essential fabric of American society has been ripped up and burned. I don’t trust anybody anymore, and that trust means that I go from sleepless nights wondering what will happen to Social Security to mornings where I sit with drunks in a room discussing God. These people think I’m crazy, which is true, and irretrievably lost in my rabbit hole. I am, of course, but I also would like a government that has weathermen who have access to buoys which can measure water temperature and atmospheric conditions, since it is blazingly hot here in Puerto Rico, and we’re in hurricane season. But Trump and Elon Musk have slashed all of those services, as well as funding for a whole host of necessary things like getting the sea lampreys out of the Great Lakes or taking care of Ebola outbreaks. We had basic trust in each other, even after the 60’s and Vietnam. We could agree on shit, like getting the eels out of the lakes, or reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Now, we can’t, and every gringo I meet carries an unseen burden: prove to me that you’re not a Trump supporter. If you’re wearing any religious paraphernalia, like a hajib or a crucifix around your neck, you’re my enemy.

17. …Punto! Which means that…

18. …the one defining and valuable thing about the American Experiment (as my High School History text titled itself) is finished. Good will is lost, and if I loved truth, good will was infinitely more…precious? Important? Or maybe just…

19. …comfortable. Easy. Sane. We will get rid of Trump, but we will also never get back what we had—a sense of trust and belief in the better nature of our fellows. Sorry, but we’re all enemies here, not brothers, which means that we’re all…

20. …alone. We have our tribes, perhaps, but those too will prove illusive. If I can’t trust my deepest enemy, my closest friend is worthless.

 

Did I mention that the cat died?