January 2025 – Samuel Cohen

Profiles in Depravity

I would like to be working right now, at 4:41 Thursday afternoon on the 30th of January in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Five. I was working on the plan for a course for next semester earlier, I have essays for a collection to edit, I have some prep to finish for tomorrow’s seminar–but I watched this and now I just can not.

I’ve spent the last two days (doing my job and) watching RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard lie, misrepresent, and conspiracy-theorize their way through their confirmation hearings. It’s really hard to watch. Watching eight minutes of this video was somehow much worse. This was watching the country be destroyed in real time.

The great thing about millions of your fellow citizens electing a bullshitter who’s also filled with hate and completely lacking shame is that it brings you moments like the one I just watched, in which the chief executive of a nation of what, 330-something million people clumsily tries to blame a still-fresh, un-investigated, bodies-still-in-the-water air disaster on either the federal government and/or an airline hiring someone not white and male without even the thought of providing a shred of evidence of anything, really.

Before I watched this, I was in a Zoom meeting where colleagues across the country worried that students at their schools are scared to leave their dorm rooms to go to class because the Bigot in Chief has turned ICE into his own private deportation police, and then I had the privilege of watching him affix his comically narcissistic signature to an “executive order” ordering his transportation secretary (a former star of The Real World: Boston, of course) to stop hiring anyone but white men. He referred repeatedly to the importance of having people in these jobs with “large brains,” “the most competent people,” not “people there for any other reason.” Then questions from the press gave him the opportunity to speak ignorantly and hatefully about tariffs against Canada and Mexico, about putting deportees in Guantanamo Bay (“there are countries that won’t take back their criminals that they sent in to us”) and about his attempts to persuade Jordan to take displaced Palestinians (“They’re gonna do it, okay–we do a lot for them and they’re gonna do it”). Another question gave him the opportunity to show that he couldn’t remember the date by which he said federal workers had to be back in the office or be fired (“if they’re not going to come into the office and report as per the date that you know what it is, everybody knows what the date is, it’s been very well documented”).

He’s got one of the most important jobs in the world. He is not the most competent. He is not in possession of “the best brain.” He is an ignorant, uncurious bigot. His remarks demonstrate that he has no idea what he is talking about and has no interest in having one. The best part: when asked if he’d spoken to families of crash victims, he said, “I don’t want to uh comment on that” (so, okay, that’s a no) and when pressed about going down to the site, he said, “I have a plan to visit, not the site, because uh what is, you tell me, what’s the site, the water, are we going to go swimming.”

Are we going to go swimming.

This country is rich with people who serve others, who believe in and devote themselves to work that helps keep people safe or healthy, that teaches them, feeds them, aids them in organizing their communities, their towns, their lives, and who don’t enrich themselves doing it. A man who can make a joke like this, if that’s what it was, or can this heartlessly dismiss the notion of visiting the spot where the planes went down, five miles from his home and office, is not a man who has it in him to perform public service. He doesn’t believe in it and he would never devote himself to it. I am sure he thinks that real public service, like serving in the military, is for suckers. We know this. We know who he is. But sometimes seeing a concrete example of it like today’s can still bring you up short. He’s not there for us. Any of us. And sometimes it seems worth it to just say it out loud. And then get back to work.

Cocktail of the Week

This week’s cocktail is the mezcal negroni.

The negroni is a classic cocktail usually made with equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. This version substitutes mezcal for gin. Follow the recipe this week and try it yourself. This is a good week to try it. Monday of this week would be a good day of this week to make it and try it. You will want to have it approximately 1400 or so more times. Hopefully no more times after that.

Ingredients

1 oz. mezcal

1 oz. Campari

1 oz. sweet vermouth

Orange slice (garnish)

Mezcal is made from the agave plant. It is made from the heart of the agave, the piña. Most of it is made in Oaxaca, a state in the south of Mexico. It is made by Mexicans, about whom you will be hearing a lot in the next four years, most of it lies. Mezcal has a pronounced smoky flavor because of the roasting of the piña, but, like gin, it is made with fruit and herbs and so is complicated, like people when not being described by racists. People are sometimes confused about mezcal because it sounds like mescaline, but it is not a psychedelic. You may be disappointed by this at some point in the coming four years of mezcal negroni consumption.

Campari is from Italy, where they also had fascism. The modern version of vermouth also comes from Italy, though the name is a French corruption of the German word for wormwood, an original ingredient, so the flavor profile offers accents of a different national authoritarianism as well as hints of complying in advance.

The orange originally comes from China. The less said about this, the better.

Directions

The classic negroni is said to have been born shortly after the end of the first world war, in Florence, when a Count Negroni (honest!) wanted his bartender to make the vermouth, Campari, and soda cocktail he was drinking stronger. Gin was added. The name of the cocktail he had been drinking? An Americano. Do with that what you will.

Modern gin, interestingly, came from Holland and became the national booze of England in the late 17th century, as the Glorious Revolution brought to the throne William of Orange, who hailed from The Hague and was born Prince of Orange after his father died a week before his birth. After a few mezcal negronis, you will be tempted to draw parallels to and maybe even adopt “of Orange” as a nickname for a prominent contemporary figure. Resist the urge. Those nicknames aren’t funny.

Oh yeah, directions.

Fill a mixing glass with ice.

Add all ingredients (except for garnish) and stir.

Strain into a rocks glass over ice.

Garnish with half orange slice.

As a cocktail, the mezcal negroni is simple to make, but it boasts a complicated combination of flavors. There is bitterness, smokiness, and sweetness. It drinks easily for such a strongly flavored drink, which can be problematic as it is all alcohol and no mixer. But come Monday, you will be glad you added this cocktail to your roster, as it captures the country being on fire and your bitterness about what we’ve come to. The sweetness is yours to try to find. L’chaim!

1/6/2025

If you’re not the kind of person who watches C-SPAN, you might have missed this scene today: Bruce Fisher, the husband of brand-newly re-sworn-in U.S. senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), refusing to shake the hand of Vice President Kamala Harris. He offered a curt nod and returned her “thank you,” but could not manage the handshake. Just couldn’t do it, for reasons, none of which could possibly include misogyny or racism or anti-wokeism, which it hurts even to type, it’s so stupid.

I offer this:

Is it ungenerous to call this guy a piece of shit
— Sam Cohen (@samcohen.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T19:49:55.035Z

Do I regret my response? Do I really wonder if it is ungenerous? I do not and I do not. (Do I regret the absence of a question mark? I also do not. It’s a convention of online style, grandpa.) On the 6th of January, four years to the day that Deb and Bruce’s Grand Oligarchy Party stormed the building that they were standing in this morning, bent on derailing the certification of the election of the other party’s nominee, the spouse of a senator Was Going to Show Them.

Deb Fisher is not a new senator. She defeated Bob Kerry in 2012 to win her seat, won another six year term in 2018, and won a third in November. I don’t know what her husband did the other times she was sworn in. I do know that his family owns a very large ranching operation in Nebraska, large enough for the family’s children to own the majority of the stock in the family corporation, while Deb and Bruce, who moved to Nebraska five years ago, have held on to a minority share. I don’t want to judge people for owning a giant cattle ranch in Nebraska, where I am sure they are very nice to their employees, the environment, their neighbors, and the cows and I am sure their politics have nothing to do with any of that.

I also know that in 2021, Deb condemned what happened on January 6. In a statement, she said, “These rioters have no constitutional right to harm law enforcement and storm our Capitol. We are a nation of laws, not some banana republic. This must end now.” She also said that although she didn’t like the outcome of the election, fraud had not been proven, and she voted to certify the results. I also know that by May, she voted against the creation of an independent commission to investigate the riot, and that three years after the riot, she endorsed the man behind the riot. Did she ever vote to impeach that man? She did not.

Do I know how Deb feels about her husband’s little tantrum this morning? I do not. But she married him and had no visible reaction to what he did, or didn’t do, though I do imagine she will be answering questions about it for a few days.

I do know that Deb doesn’t like abortion, so much so that she’s all for a ban without exceptions. Things she’s not for? The ACA, restrictions on gun ownership, or the scientific consensus on climate change (through an aide, she has said it’s happening but it’s due to “natural cycles,” which, thanks for sharing your expertise, Dr. Fischer).

To what does this all add up? I don’t know. I do know that this senator, whose generally execrable positions are standard for today’s GOP, still on one occasion–the events of four years ago today–stood up to the con man to whom her party sold whatever tiny soul it had. For about five minutes. I also know that her husband stood in the building attacked by rioters sent in by that con man and refused to shake the hand of half of the ticket they were trying to deny the White House to. I know that people died and our democracy will never be the same. I know that, as reported today, the amount of ammunition confiscated on that day was enough to have shot every sitting member of the House and Senate five times each.

Rioter smashes Capitol window with police riot shield

Not shaking someone’s hand is the definition of petty. There’s a picture in the dictionary next to “petty” of someone not shaking someone else’s hand. I know it’s petty to not shake someone’s hand because I’m a petty person and have fantasized, repeatedly and lamely, about not shaking the hands of public figures I find awful, if given the chance. But to do it for real, today, there, at the scene of the crime? It’s still petty, but it’s also a reminder of something big–that the people who will be in charge in two weeks, the people who support them, the aggressive, sometimes violent movement of fake victims who shall not be tread upon unless it’s by the boot they choose, is big on ignoring the norms that hold democracies, however flawed and rigged and deeply undemocratic, together.

Do I think Harris should have called out Bruce Fischer? Delivered a sharp slap to his impressively pasty chops? I do not. She did what people do when they respect other people, occasions, norms. Do I think those of us who are not willing marks of the once and future con man in chief can afford to keep relying on norms and precedents and procedures and institutions and courts when the people we hope they’ll protect us from could manifestly give a shit about them?

I do not. On this fourth anniversary of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2025, we should promise each other that we won’t comply in advance, that we won’t rely on norms, that we’ll fight Project 2025 and all the little local and state projects designed to support the GOP agenda in any way we have to. We can’t shake hands with the devil, the way any number of Democratic politicians seem eager to. There’s no working with a man like this man or with people who would help him do what he wants to do to us and for himself. Maybe Bruce Fischer has shown us something after all.