SOUNDTRACK: The sounds of trump supporters violating our National Buildings in a failed Insurrection plot (2021).
[READ: December 2021] Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianisms: Volume One
One year ago trump and his lackeys tried to overthrow the government. Thankfully they failed. But one year later not enough people have been punished.
Two years into the previous administration, McSweeney’s published two small books which railed against everything the Criminal in Chief stood for and had done.
Reading these books in 2021 after he had been soundly trounced in the election and with the possibility of jail time (for any of multitude of the illegal things that he did) is somewhat calming. I think if I have read this in 2018 it would have been thoroughly dispiriting. Because even though these essays provide hope, they are just full of recounting of the horrors that that [fill in the blank] and his crew of reprobates did.
Not even including the attempted insurrection and overthrow of our country.
It has been a year since the brainwashed masses tries to overthrow our government. And still nothing has happened. Our country is broken. These essays don’t really fix it, but it’s nice to know you’re not alone in thinking this way.
TERENCE HAYES-“A Land Governed By Unkindness Reaps No Kindness”
The title is a line from the essay which concludes I commit to vote because any intelligent person has to fear when someone with no respect for authority has authority.
TOM BISSELL-“The Widening Gyre”
America used to be the well-meaning but erratic guy who arrives at a party already drunk and proceeds to down three bourbons, tell an arguably racist joke, shove a waiter, and end up vomit-crying in the bathroom while his appalled friends pat him on the back and tell him it’ll be okay. Today, however, America is the guy who arrives at an AA meeting twenty minutes late, high on meth, waving around a loaded antique luger, all while his stripper girlfriends sits outside in a 1986 Dodge Caravan hashtagging her latest Instagram post #blessed.
DODIE BELLAMY-“Attack of the Shiny Black Oxford”
Living in America today is like being a slug watching a shiny black Oxford shoe hovering above you.
LEV GROSSMAN-“How Can You Not See This?”
Grossman imagines hosting a talk show in which a liberal Democrat (himself) and a conservative Republican come on and discuss hot-button issues. The one rule is no one is allowed to get angry–if you get pissed off you’re kicked off. Of course, he winds up saying the essay title a lot.
KAO KALIA YANG-“The Wide World of Belonging”
Kao was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1980, after her people, the Hmong had just escaped genocide. She writes because
when the Central Intelligence Agency of the Unite States of America came to the high mountains of Laos and commissioned the death of the Hmong men and boys, the women and children, those high-ranking men never envisioned a life like mine taking root on American soil… [and because she is committed ] to a world that believes that little girls deserve a chance to grow up and become women, and that women are far stronger than any intelligence agency, machine of state and death, on earth.
OWEN KING-“The Idea of Reasonable Debate”
Everytown for Gun Safety says that ninety-six Americans are killed (on average) by a gun every day. Imagine a gymnasium filled with ninety-six people. Now imagine them being ripped apart by gunfire. Every day. The NRA would like us to accept this as the price of freedom.
This argument makes reasonable debate seem absurd because what population of reasonable people would consent to live this way, perpetually under fire.
HARMONY HOLIDAY-“This Bigness and this Whiteness”
You have to be big and white to make it in this world. Even if you are neither. If you start to make it it’s important to check yourself to see how far from yourself you have gotten.
RICK MOODY-“Obfuscation is the Enemy”
The previous administration makes Orwell’s doublethink seem quaint.
TRACY O’NEILL”More For More Than Me”
O’Neill points out basic facts that employees seem to not understand
A day has an endpoint, therefore an infinite number of tasks cannot be fit into a work day. Bodies require calories. Calories cost money A baseline living wage is required to do a good or even mediocre job. A dead person cannot perform therefore healthcare provides the necessary conditions for producing value. Babies are not self sufficient therefor paid family leave matters immensely to those interested in the simultaneous continuation of humanity and a functioning economy.
CAConrad-“Politically Correct? Hear Me Out, Please”
Is it politically correct to be branded the Town Faggot and ask for the violence to stop? Maybe the word is simply Correct. People are fighting the anti-LGBTQ laws on the books in unexpectedly places like Kentucky.
KAREN JOY FOWLER-“The Hundred Percent Doctrine”
Fowler takes action because trump has no plan in place to protect us against natural disasters. The Hundred Percent Doctrine says that if you can find even one scientist who thinks climate change doesn’t pose a grave threat to life on earth, then you’re free to ignore it completely. IOf trump can’t put it in his bank account it has no value to him.
MARTIN SEAY-“A Few Words in Defense of American Institutions (Which Is To Say Us)”
American Institutions include all branches and functions of the government–everything created to protect the every day life of Americans.
YAHIA LABABIDI-“Never Forget, Never Remember”
Maybe trump is the moral crisis we need to help us wake up to the suffering of the world and our interconnectedness. As a dual citizen of Egypt and the U.S. Lababidi sees their art as a peace offering.
SALLY WEN MAO-“I Refuse”
Egregious racist bans do nothing to help the country.
I refuse refuse refuse refuse refuse to accept this reality, to accept this administration’s brazen allegiance to bigotry.
KEVIN BOYLE-“Why I’ll Keep Protesting”
A Hillary election party had gone horribly wrong. Boyle was concerned that people would give up, but donations to political causes doubled after the election. There were so many causes to join: Women’s March, protests against the Muslim Band, rallies against Charlottesville, the March for OUr Lives. As long as we don’t stop protesting.
MITRA JOUHARI-“Xenophobia, Bigotry, and Hatred”
As a first generation Iranian-American she fears that she will never see her family again. Her love for her family is stronger than the hatred trump has for people who look like her.
BILL McKIBBEN-“There is No End to That Season Anymore”
trump America will not sign the Paris accord. Every other nation on earth has signed on. Every other one. Everyone is allowed to argue about policy but when you argued against physics (or reality in general), we can not afford it.
RAQUEL SALAS RIVERA-“It Pours Down”
When trump tossed paper towels to the victims in Puerto Rico, we weren’t told the victims were actually local people who were bussed there for the photo op. Those most in need were chosen for the humiliation. Puerto Rico has often been a testing ground– the people there have been used as guinea pigs since 1898. trump hopes to evict the islanders and rebuilt Puerto Rico as a country without Puerto Ricans. Imagine a free Puerto Rico! Decolonize Puerto Rico!
JIM SHEPARD-“Be Counted”
When looking at trump’s offenses, overload is inevitable. But the most concerning is the slide into authoritarianism [and still is from the Senate]. In the Weimar Republic in Germany, violence from the left was brutally punished while violence from the right received a slap on the wrist. But America in 2020 is more democratic and more willing to fight back than Germany was in 1930
MELISSA CHADBURN-“The Extraordinary Self”
Chadburn talks about Sandra Henriquez an undocumented worker who has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. And what if it were your child, your mother, your father, your sibling who was going to be torn from you?
STEVE ERICKSON-“Not Him But Us”
The question isn’t is he unfit for president, its whether we are fit to be American citizens. The president didn’t happen to us, we happened to America. There’s nothing we know about him that we didn’t know before he ran. He says:
I’ve lived through twelve presidents before this one and have vivid memories of ten. Sooner or later each did something to anger or frustrate or embarrass me in a manner passing or profound. None, however made me ashamed of my country for having elected him–until now.
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER-“I Commit”
Zapruder ends the book with a poem.
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