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!