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These last couple of weeks have felt a bit like the days immediately after the election. Everyone I bump into asks if I heard what Trump said about this, and was anybody going to push back on that, and does Congress actually do anything anymore, and why aren’t the Democrats in Congress making more noise and being less nice? And is it even safe to fly? (It is.) And what the heck is going to happen next?
I believe there is some doom scrolling going on. It happens. I will not sugar coat it: there are some bad actors doing bad things in Washington, DC. I am glad so many people are plugged in, and I hope they will find the people who were Googling “Did Joe Biden drop out?” on election day and shake them by their collars and tell them to pay attention and participate because that is their duty.
If you are doom scrolling, I suggest you use some of that scrolling time and perhaps a pen or pencil and paper to get very specific about the main thing that is bothering you, and then call your Senators and your Representative in Congress. Be firm, but polite. Do not call them Nazi sympathizers unless they are Ron Johnson or Tommy Tuberville, in which case they will think they are being called some kind of computerized music machine. You may also call Marjorie Taylor Green a Nazi sympathizer, but only because she is one and would enjoy the recognition.
None of what Trump or pasty-white apartheid apologist Elon Musk and his band of smirking tech babies are doing bothers my Senators or my Representative in Congress one bit. Yet. For them, Congress and its scope of authority is whatever Donald Trump or Elon Musk want it to be. It is still worth calling them. This Treasury thing is a big deal, and the Office of Personnel Management is much more than a corporate human resources department. They manage security clearances. They have information that could do grave damage to national security, especially if cross-checked with information from Treasury.
But do not be too alarmed. Do not be panicked, because that is not a good place for thinking. That is the zone where right-wing media purposely keeps their audience with a steady stream of outrage and trauma. Remember: Pennywise the Clown is evil, but he will always lose. This will suck. We will win.
Anger is okay to an extent. Personally, I have seethed. I have been just short of on the warpath with my bayonet fixed. That is not a good communication mode for me, so I process it into something else first. Otherwise, I might accidentally call Elon Musk a pasty-white apartheid apologist and Marjorie Taylor Greene a Nazi sympathizer, and some people would consider that rude.
I even dreamed the other night that Donald Trump showed up at my book club. (I am not currently in an active book club.) We were discussing Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Trump would not shut up. He hadn’t done the reading, of course. He thought the novel was “Jane Air,” like an HVAC company or an airline. He knew something about a house burning down and a crazy woman in the attic. Blah, blah, blah, he went, but the book club president would not take control and tell him to put a sock in it. I was fuming. Book club was supposed to be a refuge, a place where we escaped hearing from or about Donald Trump for a while. Sure, he was out there making a mess of the country, but he had no right to interfere in book club.
I told my wife about the dream while she watched Love After Lockup. She is from Warsaw, Indiana, where such shows are considered high culture.
I am kidding. My wife is a reader and (unlike me) actually is in an active book club. She does find trashy reality TV to be an escape, though. For me, those shows are too much like watching the Trump administration. I yell at the TV and groan at the poor judgment. I imagine foreigners watching the show, and I’m embarrassed that they could see the United States this way, even if it is what passes for high culture in Warsaw, Indiana.
Pete Hegseth looks like a good fit for an episode of Intervention, and Kristi Noem seems just so happy to be on this Love Island journey with us and thinks that we’re so, like, authentic—almost as authentic as her ICE-raid hair extensions. Every day, it seems, there’s another picture of Noem in a new getup—ICE raider, border cowgirl, border-collie killer—as if she’s hoping someone will develop an action-figure collection she can sell on Newsmax.
My wife asked, “Why Jane Eyre?” It might be because Jane Eyre is a character with a very strong moral compass, where Trump has none. Or maybe it’s that Jane Eyre is a fictional character who endures great hardship, while Trump is a real person who endures only fictional hardship. It could also be more about the author than the character: I just saw a story about a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas City, and tuberculosis is what killed Charlotte Brontë’s sisters, Anne and Emily. Charlotte died from complications of early pregnancy. The things that killed the Brontë sisters seem poised for a big comeback in the second Trump administration.
There’s also this: Charlotte Brontë once sent a sample of her poetry to poet laureate Robert Southey along with a note seeking advice. He replied, in part, that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not be.”
That guy was such a Pete Hegseth.
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