trump – Samuel Cohen

Going Underground

*Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York* (1865) by Egbert Ludovicus Viele

Below please find a few words I delivered to introduce the closing plenary of a seminar last week. It’s short but says something about what it’s like for humanities professors trying to help run departments, divisions, or colleges during the worst assault on higher education this country has ever seen.

Association of Departments of English/Association of Language Departments Summer Seminar 2025, New York University

Plenary V and Closing: Doing the Good Work in Uncertain Times

Good afternoon and thanks for sticking it out. I’m Sam Cohen, of the University of Missouri and the Executive Committee of the ADE, and I will be your presider this afternoon. I’ll begin by briefly introducing our speakers; then, after a few words from me, we’ll have opening remarks from them and then discussion.

Our speakers: Amy Woodbury Tease from Norwich University; Gillian Lord from the University of Florida; Beth Howells from Georgia Southern University; and Reginald Wilburn from Texas Christian University. Please see the resource document thingie for their bios (not now!).

I’d like to start us off with a little local history. And there’s a lot of it right on this block: The Silver Center was built (under the name Main Building) in 1892 on the foundation of the original 1835 Gothic revival building that stood here; its first five floors for decades housed the American Book Company, a textbook concern most famous for publishing the McGuffey Readers, which taught generations of Americans how and what to read; the Brown Building of Science, to our east, stands on the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. That’s a lot of history for one block, which is not uncommon in New York, a city known not so much for preservation as for development, unfortunately emblematized lately by a particular national figure.

But the particular piece of very local history I want to focus on is the creek that used to run through the land on which Washington Square now stands, just to our west, Minetta Creek. It had two sources, one running south from what is now Fifth Avenue and 21^st Street, just south of the Flatiron Building, the other beginning at Sixth Ave and 16^th St, the two meeting at Fifth and 11th, just north of the park, and heading downtown and west to eventually empty into the Hudson. What makes this history interesting is what happened to the creek in the development of Manhattan from its pre-New Amsterdam state—before it was sold to Peter Minuit by the Canarsee, a group of Lenape Indians who neglected to tell him that they only occupied a small part of it. (So the story of that sale, usually told so the natives look like they got rooked—they only got twenty-four dollars-worth of beads and trinkets!—could also be told as the tale of Manhattan’s originary shady real estate deal.)

Minetta Creek was covered over in the 1820s, as the area through which it ran was developed, the potter’s field on its east bank closed and converted to a military parade ground and finally a park. But for decades the creek continued to run underground, popped up under West Village basements, could be traced, some said, by patterns of illness among residents under whose buildings it ran. There are at least two buildings in the neighborhood that house fountains that a hundred years ago filled with bubbled-up creek water. Whether it still runs under the streets is a mystery, but there are people who still look for it, drawn by the history and the mystery, maybe even attracted by the rich metaphorical possibilities of a hidden underground river running beneath a city.

Our speakers are here this afternoon, as our title says, to talk about doing the good work in uncertain times. I bring up the story of Minetta Creek to introduce this closing discussion because rather than focusing only on the uncertain times that are making the doing of the good work more difficult than the usual difficult, I’m hoping that we can talk more about the good work, and thinking about the story of the creek might help us do that, and I also just really like the story. I like it because the existence of a mysterious underground river appeals to me naturally but also because it appeals to me as someone trained in literature and writing. This creek is almost too much metaphor—it can stand in for the underlying forces of history, the costs of modernity, the unconscious and other subtexts. It’s even a metaphor for metaphor—for meaning-making. The good work we do is about many things, including of course the future employment for which study in literature and language (and folklore and history and art history and religion) prepares our students, but beyond that—beneath that—it’s about the work we help our students and faculty do to make meaning, to close read the world to see how it works and how it could work differently. It’s about a different kind of development, the development of individuals and communities through knowledge. It’s about insisting on these things against the things—like overemphasis on career, on the promises of technology, on the bottom line—that threaten to drive this good work underground.

So I’m opening this closing with a metaphor, which, like all metaphors, you can take or leave. But please join me now in listening to the ideas for doing the good work that our speakers, out of whose way I will now get, will offer, and in continuing the discussion they’ll begin.

Requiem

Anna Akhmatova

This set of poems was written by Anna Akhmatova from 1935-1961. Most of the poems were written in the 1940s, but Akhmatova did not think it would be safe for her to publish them at the time. They weren’t published in Russia until 1987. The below steals from a few different translations I could find on the internet (my favorite, Judith Hemschemeyer’s, is in the Norton World Lit but not online).

I wanted to post a version of Requiem tonight. Something about the last few weeks makes me want people who don’t know it to read it and people who do to read it again. I’ve been trying and trying to “describe this,” in Akhmatova’s words, to write about what’s happening to my country, and I will have to find a way, but for now the poems of a mother whose husband and son were jailed in another country, who had to memorize (rather than write out) her poems about the nightmare her country had become in order to stay out of prison herself, will have to do.

We’re not as far from this as we think we are.

No. Not under the vault of a foreign sky,
nor carried by a stranger’s broad wings —
in that time I stood with my people,
there, in our gray and unfortunate land.
— 1961


Instead of a Preface
In the terrifying years of Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in
the prison lines of Leningrad. Somehow, at some point, someone
“recognized” me.
Then the woman standing behind me, her lips blue in the cold
light, a fellow sleepwalker who had certainly never heard my name
before, woke from her fetters and whispered in my ear (there, everyone
spoke in a whisper):
— And this? Can you describe this?
And I said:
— I can.
Then something resembling a smile slipped across the apparition
that only a moment before had been her face.


Dedication
The mountains kneel before our tragedy,
the great river is silenced at its source.
But our sorrow cannot break the prison locks;
behind them, despair tunnels endlessly on.
Will the spring breeze caress your face?
Will the sunset gently reveal you?
Not us. Our prison stretches to the sea:
everywhere the scream of key on stone
and the slogging stamp of soldiers’ boots.
We rose, as if for early Mass, and trudged
amid the tombstones of our ruined capital,
to face each other, more lifeless than the dead;
the sun sank low, the Neva misted,
and hope’s song came only on the wind.
The verdict. . . and she cries out,
suddenly alien, torn from the crowd,
as if life were ripped directly from her chest,
as if thrown to the floor, brutally, in haste.
But she continues . . . staggers on . . . alone . ..
Where are they now, my shadow friends
from those two years in hell?
What visions are theirs in the blind Siberian wind?
What do they see in the dim halo of the moon?
Will they hear this, my last farewell? My final greeting.


Prologue
Only a corpse could smile,
content, finally, to rest.
And like a useless appendage, 
Leningrad swung from its prisons.
Mad from torture, contorted regiments
marched around the prisons’ naked walls
while farewell songs wailed
from train horns.
Stars of death stood above us
as innocent Russia cringed
beneath bloody boots
and the tire-tread of Black Marias.


1 
They took you at dawn.
I followed, as if in a funeral procession.
In the dark pantry, children cried.
Before the Virgin Mother, a candle
drowned in its own wax.
Your lips were chill from the icon’s kiss.
The death-sweat on your brow . . . indelible.
Like the wives of Imperial Archers,
I shall stand howling under the Kremlins towers.


2
Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into my house slips the yellow moon.
He enters with his hat askew,
sees his shadow, that yellow moon.
This woman is sick to the bone,
this woman is sick and alone;
her husband dead, son shackled away.
Pray for me . . . for me, pray.

3
No. It is someone else who suffers.
I could not bear such pain. It isn’t me.
Shroud it in black; have the moon eclipse it.
Let them carry the torches away. . .
Night.


4
If I showed you, you silly girl,
beloved prankster, my merry
little sinner from Tzarskoye Selo,
what will happen to your life —
How three-hundredth in line, with a parcel,
you would stand by the Kresty prison, 
your fiery tears 
burning through the New Year’s ice.
See yourself at that silent dance, fixed
amid the sway of prison poplars. No sound.
No sound. Yet how many innocent lives
are ending...


5
Seventeen months I have screamed,
calling you home to me.
I threw myself at your executioners feet,
my son, my fate, my horror.
This moment is an infinite puzzle,
without solution, no, never for me:
man and beast, indistinguishable, crawling.
How long will I await this execution?
Only dusty flowers remain,
and the quiet censer, smoking;
and footprints that lead to nothing.
The immense star looks into my eyes
threatening, threatening: a promise
of ready death.


6
Time flies on, nearly weightless;
what happened, I don’t understand.
This city’s white nights peered
in on your prison cell; O, how again they watch
with a hawk’s burning eyes: pale nights
speaking of your lofty cross
and of death.


7
The Sentence
And the stone word fell
on my still living breast.
It is all right. I was ready for this,
after all. I’ll get by. Somehow...
I have the distraction of my chores:
I must destroy my past. Finally.
I must petrify my soul, then somehow
learn to nurture what remains —
Be that as it may... summer rustles
like a celebration outside my window.
I could smell it coming on the wind:
this sunny day; this empty house.


8
To Death
You will come in any case — why not now?
I am waiting for you—I cannot take much more.
I turned off the light and opened the door
for you. For you, so simple. And so strange.
Come to me, take any form you please:
burst through me like deadly hail;
strike me from behind like a weary thief;
fill my lungs, let me choke on your typhus gas.
Or recite the fairy tale you concocted: That little story
which makes us all sick; your mouthful of churned vomit —
so again I see the top of a policemans blue hat
and the caretaker, pale and trembling with fear.
It makes no difference. The Yenisei roils,
the North Star shines, and they will not cease today.
But the last horror is setting
in my beloved's sea-blue eyes.


9
Already the wing of madness
has shadowed half my soul,
held fiery wine to my lips,
and drawn me into its black valley.
I knew that to this devil’s wisdom
I must acquiesce: with tired ears
I listened to my garbling tongue,
then translated my own voice.
It says I may not take anything
along on my journey
(no matter that I politely ask
... no matter that I grovel) —
Not the fear of my sons face —
his paralyzed suffering — not
the day of that thunderous word,
nor the hour I met him in shackles.
Not his dear, cool hands,
nor a linden’s restless shadow
touched by the murmuring wind,
nor his final words of consolation.


10

Crucifixion
“Don’t cry for me, Mother.
Can’t you see I’m in the grave?”

1
A choir of angels glorified the hour,
the gray sky turned to molten light.
“Father, why hast thou forsaken Me?
Oh, Mother, please don’t cry for Me.”

2
Mary Magdalene tore at her breast, sobbing;
the beloved disciple watched Him, petrified.
His Mother stood away from them, immersed
in her own silence, where no one dared glance.

 
Epilogue

1
I learned how faces collapse under the weight
of a century, how terror peeks out from eyelids
cracked like stone tablets, and cuneiform suffering
etches its stony language on hollowed cheeks.
How a lock of cherished hair may turn
from black and gold to hasty silver;
how smiles wither on resigned lips,
and terror becomes trembling laughter.
I’m not praying for myself alone,
but for everyone who stood there with me
in crippling frost, and in July’s gnawing heat
before that blind red wall.

2
Again, the hour of remembrance draws near.
I see, I hear, I feel you; and I know them:

the fragile one we helped to the window,
the one who no longer wakes to her mother

land; and the girl who shook her beautiful hair,
saying, “I have come.” As if returning home.

I want to call out to them, each by name,
but the list that names them was stolen.

For them I weave a wide cloak
of shabby, eavesdropped words.

I remember them everywhere, always,
even in new troubles they are with me.

One hundred million people scream through
me, and if my tormented mouth is muzzled,

let them remember me as well, in my pen
ultimate moment, on my own remembrance day.

And if, by chance, this country should one
day decide to erect a monument to me, well

I graciously grant my permission.
But on these conditions: do not place

it by the sea, where I was born:
the sea no longer touches me;

nor plant it in the Tzarskoy garden, near
the sacred stump, where shades hunt me out;

but place it here, where I stood for three hundred
hours. Here, where the prison door will not unbolt

for me. Because I dread a peaceful death — for fear
I might forget the thunderous charge of Black Marias,

forget the arrhythmic drumming of fists on a door,
or the wounded howl of the old woman behind it.

So let the melting snow stream like tears
from the forged bronze eyes of my colossus,

while a prison dove coos from afar,
and ships glide silently along the Neva.

Gulf of America

With help from Merriam-Webster:

gulf

noun

1. A part of the ocean or sea extending into the land

The U.S. has a few gulfs, among them the Gulf of Alaska, the Gulf of Maine, and the Gulf of Mexico. California has a couple more gulfs. The country’s also got plenty of sounds and bays and inlets (and even ten fjords), but only a few gulfs. If you look them up in a reference book (if you’re old and like books) or a reputable website, you’ll find pictures like the one above.

However, if you look them up on Google Maps, a formerly reputable website, you will find that the Gulf of Mexico has a different name. The Goniff in Chief* had a big idea, and he was so excited about this Big Idea that he made a proclamation, like a little King. And he decided there should be a day dedicated to his Big Idea.

Why did Google go along with this? According to the BBC, “Google said it was making the change as part of ‘a longstanding practice’ of following name changes when updated by official government sources.” A cynic might suggest that the real answer lies in the tech CEO tableau below, taken at the inauguration.

Since the Gulf is just a big giant stretch of water and has no government to object, apparently our President, if that’s what you want to call him and who am I to stop you, can just call it whatever he wants and that somehow has the force of law, or enough force to bring a Master of the Tech Universe (shout out to Tom Wolfe) to heel. Greenland, on the other hand, has, unfortunately from only this one point of view, a government and even people living there, so if we want it renamed, we have to buy it. But how? As of yesterday, there’s a bill for that:

Thanks, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA). What do you get an authoritarian with the mind of a child who’s already got everything? Asked and answered.

2. A deep chasm: ABYSS

This hemispheric mislabeling/conquest misheggos is only one small part of the abyss that is opening up before us as a result of the country’s losing its misinformed, social media-misshapen mind and electing the GIC. Impending financial crash? Check. Full-blown constitutional crisis? Check. Crippling of scientific research, social services, and higher education? Check. Explicit bigotry enshrined in a flurry of deadly policies? Check. Loss of faith in our national project, always fallen short of but never just thrown out and lit on fire? Check. Will we fall into this abyss, this chasm, this Gulf of America, where we rename things because we want to Own Everything and Don’t Care About Other People? Can we stop it now? When the Vice President says judges can’t tell members of the executive or legislative branch what to do or more importantly what not to do, what is there to do?

3. WHIRLPOOL

Odysseus, just trying to get home to see his faithful dog, had to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, the man-eating monster and the ship-swallowing whirlpool. The rotating waters of the Strait of Messina, off Sicily, are only dangerous to small craft, a still-reputable website tells me, but that’s what experts think inspired the Charybdis of Greek mythology.

To be between Scylla and Charybdis, a saying still known by the kind of people who consult reference books, is to be between a rock and a hard place. I don’t know if that’s the right saying to capture where we are right now. What are our two impossible choices? Do we have any choices? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some?

4. A wide gap; the gulf between generations

The Gulf of America that bothers many of us the most about what’s happened in the last three weeks–it’s only been three weeks!– is the widening gaps being driven between already divided Americans. The greatest gap is one that’s not so much between the Haves and the Have Nots but between the Have Everythings and Everyone Else, a divide that “gap” and “abyss” and “chasm” don’t begin to capture. There’s the gaps between the right kind of Christian and everyone else, between white and Black, straight and not, right and left, American and foreigner, but all of these gaps, these gulfs, as significant as they are, aren’t just preexisting conditions worsened by people in power who don’t care. They are the gaps exploited by the Have Everythings so they can have more: more money, more power, more control to remake the country as they want it. They’re not just widening our gulfs; they’re using them, feeding off of them.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico in itself is just silly. But it stands for the ascendancy of jingoistic bullying, of xenophobic hatred, of disregard and even disdain for following the rules that animates our current rulers. It’s what swept them into power and it’s what so many of your neighbors share with them, if you’re being honest. There’s your Gulf of America. You’re standing in it.

*goniff, as defined in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. Number 6 does not apply, as no proof of him loving fun is in evidence

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.

First lady of Poland skipping handshake opportunity

FUBAR

It’s been eleven hours and three days since the AP called the Presidential election in favor of the man who held the office during the worst presidency we’ve ever had. Nothing compares 2 him, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the 2024 version of Trump will supplant the 2016-2020/early 2021 version. Many of us think this is a bad thing. However, in spite of what is to some of us a confusing set of numbers, it is clear that our next, sure to be even worse president seems to have gotten significantly more votes than his opponent, and he’s gotten them from people who one assumes do not think this is a bad thing. Which raises questions, such as Why do they not think it is a bad thing? and What is wrong with this country? and What the fuck?

I don’t know how to answer those questions (especially the last one, which isn’t really a question). But I do want to talk about the title of this post, which I swear has something to do with all of this: I went to a high school headed by a man whose (I hope but seriously doubt secret) nickname among the students was FUBAR. Not coming from a military family, this was how I learned what the old Army-originating term FUBAR meant or, more accurately, what some people meant by it. At that school in central New Jersey (you’re damn right it’s real, @njgov), we thought it meant Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

I have learned at some point in the intervening almost forty years that some people think it means Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Merriam-Webster has it as Recognition. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it as Recognition (and includes the sanitized “Fouled” that even I, who do not come from a military family, know is a coverup).

The OED also tells us that the first recorded use of FUBAR in print was in 1944 in Yank, a weekly magazine produced for US soldiers during WWII. Yank was the idea of a man named Egbert White, who had worked for Stars and Stripes in the war before WWII, which nobody then knew to call World War I, so they just said it was a great war. The great war. Apparently the inclusion of a pin-up photograph was a big draw for the magazine, whose name, again, was Yank. White himself got yanked from the leadership of the paper over certain editorial decisions; you can read about it in his essay, “A Free Press in a Citizen’s Army,” which for some reason appeared in the Journal of Educational Sociology.

I never saw any evidence of FUBAR’s being actually fucked up, beyond repair or recognition. He was a genial and to me distant presence. He came to a track meet once and watched my race and had a chat with my mom. My sense is that FUBAR was just an old nickname that some boys a long time ago had given him because they were boys a long time ago. But I was as oblivious then as I am now, so who knows. I do know that before graduation my friend Taylor and I stole a personalized From the Desk of, &c. notepad off of his desk, and he found out about it some time later because I used a sheet from it to write a thank-you note to my college counselor, who helped me get into a much better college than I deserved to, and it was reported back to me that FUBAR was amused. He has been dead for a quarter century, as has my college counselor. I think I still have the rest of that pad somewhere, but I wouldn’t know who to write to using it.

I’ve gotten a little deeper into all of this than was strictly necessary because I’ve been putting off saying what I want to say about the bad thing that has happened: it’s really, really bad. I don’t need to go into how right now. As I said on here a couple of weeks before election day, Trump is a bully who’s never demonstrated he has any interest in right or wrong, the Constitution, or the welfare of other people. A few days after that, again on here, I was wondering about the effects of seeing a man like that on our ubiquitous screens, on us and especially on the youngest of us. And a couple of days ago I was thinking about my students’ reaction to what happened the day before. His presidency very well could be as much of a disaster for the people he’s conned into thinking he will take care of them as for the people who know he won’t. Most of my students seem to think it will be a disaster for them, for people they love, and for people they don’t know but don’t want to see hurt, and I can’t say they’re wrong.

My question for right now is which kind of FUBAR we are. Are we Fucked Up Beyond All Repair? Or are we just Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition? Is there a difference? Say it’s the latter. Many people are saying they don’t recognize their country anymore, seeing so many of their neighbors vote for someone they think we all ought to have rejected a long time ago. Is that the kind of FUBAR we are? If so, can we imagine the country becoming more like we thought it was, more like we want it to be? Can we hope that our neighbors will wake up to the reality of what just happened, to what the country will really be like under Trump 2, to what he will do to them too?

Or say it’s the former, that we’re Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. He’s packed the courts with people who don’t seem to care about the law except in terms of what it can do for certain people, classes, religions. He’s got legislators and captains of industry in line. He’s got journalists bothsidesing the apocalypse. (On tonight’s panel, for an opposing view, Satan.) He’s got some people scared and some people feeling they’ve been given permission not just to think but to say and do what they say we all are already thinking and have always wanted to say and do. (Except we weren’t, and we haven’t.) He’s got everything lined up for four years of unbridled meanness and limitless corruption.

Maybe the most important question for right now isn’t which kind of FUBAR we are. But maybe it is–maybe we can’t ask ourselves any other questions about what to do, or what we can learn from how we got here, or how we can end up somewhere better, until we answer that. And the answer won’t in the end be about facts. It will be about what we want to accept. Knowing how hard so many people worked for an outcome different from the one we have apparently gotten, I don’t think Beyond Repair is it.

In the Homestretch

One of the worst things about US politics is our campaigns–the incredible length, the obscene amounts of money, the pandering both to the base and to the ever-shrinking number of somehow, unbelievably, inexplicably undecided. The horse race coverage by journalists doesn’t help, milking the drama for clicks, leaving their obligation to inform by the wayside, save for scandals and gaffes. Following the metaphor of the campaign as something to be handicapped and bet on, we’re in the homestretch. We’ve rounded the final turn, we’re headed to the finish line.

So this campaign season is over in a day or so, and it couldn’t end soon enough. As my future state senator put it yesterday:

Absolutely furious at whoever decided to move clocks back this weekend and add an extra hour to the election
— Stephen Webber 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@s_webber) November 2, 2024

I knocked a few doors yesterday, just supporting my wife, who’s knocked a million. I have been mostly reading too much, giving what I can, worrying, blogging into the void. I’ve been going to some campaign events and, as always, have been impressed by the hard-working, heart-in-the-right place state politicians I’ve encountered. Yesterday I met Crystal Quade, the Democratic candidate for governor, who Missourians, if they knew what was good for them, would elect, but if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that people have been voting against their own interests every two years for decades.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas was published the summer we moved to “the real America,” as one Missourian described the Midwest to us after finding we’d just moved here from New York City. For the past twenty years, we’ve watched gerrymandering, culture wars, and the nimble weaponizing of bigotry and xenophobia turn our new home state from purple to ostensibly red; as a result, we’ve watched the politics and the governing get meaner, we’ve watched support of public goods and private rights erode, and we’ve tried to do what we can to fight it. It’s been tempting to give up on Missouri, just as watching the national GOP elevate its worst to the top of their party has made it easy to despair for the country, but we can’t. We have to hope.

One hope is that what’s the matter with the undecideds of Kansas, Missouri, and the country is that they just don’t have all the information they need, and that the armies of people out knocking doors and making calls can get that information to them in time. The other, more realistic hope is that the decided but under-motivated will be moved to turn out and do their part to get the right people past the finish line first so they can move on and do the actual work of public service.

Of course it’s not a race, it’s not a sport, it’s not a game, it’s not even very much fun. It’s staving off the worst of the current GOP agenda and doing it for women, people of color, people from elsewhere, queer people, people who value public education and the Constitution and all of the better ideas and impulses we have. Nobody needs me to tell them about it this close to election day:

1730829600

days

hours minutes seconds

until

Election Day

Nobody needs me to tell them anything, probably. Sometimes it just makes me feel better, in the midst of all of this anxiety and all of this outrage, to say some things. Sometimes it makes me feel better to say that in spite of this country’s mixed history and all of the hate and bigotry and selfishness we’ve seemed happy to display over the past few centuries, we can be better. We’re not better than this–we are all we’ve done and all we continue to do–but we could be better. One of the ways we can is to vote for people who want that. And help get the information to others that might help them do it too.

I’ll see you on the other side of election day.

& & &

A young visitor to my house on Halloween used our sticky “blood” letters to spell out this message on our porch door. Knowing that I can’t ask him what his intent was in crafting this message, and aware of the intentional fallacy, I choose to interpret it as a comment on the election. It says, to the clever Republican politicians who know better and the idiots who don’t, to the liars of the alternate reality universe, to the spineless and/or craven oligarchs, and to the saps who have fallen for the Man Who Will Say What We Were Thinking But Wouldn’t Say in Public, thinking he gives a shit about them: we won’t let you put him in office again. That’s what I think it says. Say it with me.

Rallying

In April 1978, at the Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, The Clash played their song “English Civil War” live for the first time. The organization Rock Against Racism, formed in 1976 in reaction to racist incidents and the rise of the National Front in the UK as well as to racist statements by Eric Clapton and David Bowie, staged two national carnivals in 1978, the first in Victoria Park in East London, where The Clash played with Steel Pulse, a reggae band from Birmingham, and a few other punk bands.

“English Civil War” is set to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” the American Civil War ballad, and also borrows its first line. The song uses this inspiration to imagine the war it fears is, as Joe Strummer said in an interview shortly after the song’s first performance, “right around the corner.” I thought of the song yesterday, after watching clips from Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally the night before, and played it couple of times. I’m playing it right now.

The line that made me think of this song yesterday: “Your face was blue in the light of the screen/As we watched the speech of an animal scream.” As has been the case for nine years, I’m angry at Trump and his mob’s racist, hateful rhetoric almost as much as I am at what he’s done in office, at what he’s inspired in others in other offices, and at what he threatens to do if he gets into the White House again. I’m angry at this rhetoric not only because of the immediate effects on its objects and the potential acts of violence it can inspire but because of the long-term effects on us. Our faces are lit by our screens a thousand times more than they were in 1978, everywhere we go, walking and driving and laying in bed; these days, we get to hear animal screams like we heard a couple of nights ago everywhere and all the time. If you’re the immediate object of the hatred, of the racist attacks on your intelligence and humanity, the hurt must go very deep. If you’re not but don’t agree with what they yell and don’t want to live in a world where it’s okay to yell those things, that’s another kind of hurt, also profound. But what if you don’t know to be hurt, don’t know that it’s not okay to yell those things? What if you’ve grown up in the last nine years hearing them? What if you’ve seen people cheering them on and repeating them?

What I didn’t remember until I listened again to “English Civil War” is how the song ends:

When Johnny comes marching home again
Nobody understands it can happen again
The sun is shining and the kids are shouting loud
But you gotta know it’s shining through a crack in the cloud
And the shadows keep on falling when Johnny comes marching home

The balancing of hope and fear in these lines capture what all the young punks (to quote a different song) involved in Rock Against Racism must have been feeling almost fifty years ago as they heard the boots of the National Front crunching around the corner and the spittle-flecked slurs fly from Eric Clapton’s lips. They hoped that calling it all out, together, shouting loud, would have some effect, but at the same time they feared that it wouldn’t be enough, that the sun squeezing through the crack in the clouds would lose out to the falling, looming shadows. That it could happen again.

Fifty years later and a week out from election day, millions of Americans know the feeling. But millions of us don’t–they’re cheering on the animal scream. And fifty years from now, the kids whose faces were blue from the light of the screens showing them these rallies, these speeches, this hate: what about them?

& & &

“English Civil War” was released as a single in February 1979. The b-side was a cover of the Toots and the Maytals song, “Pressure Drop.” The Clash had already covered a Junior Murvin song, “Police and Thieves,” on their first album, demonstrating their affinity for reggae music and for its incorporation of political sentiment (though it may not have always been appreciated– Murvin’s initial response to the cover was reportedly “They have destroyed Jah work!”). Toots Hibbert has said that “Pressure Drop” is a song about karma, about bad things happening to people who do bad things to innocent people–“pressure’s going to drop on you”–and that he wrote it after he had been innocently imprisoned. It may be a revenge song, but it’s not about violence, at least not explicitly; instead, it’s about the knowledge coming to the malefactor–“I say when it drops, oh you gonna feel it/Know that you were doing wrong.”

So I’ll end my early evening in the office listening to this song instead. It’s not a happy song, exactly, though it’s less unhappy than “English Civil War.” But the hope that people doing wrong will know that they were doing it, someday–or at least and maybe even better, that the millions watching will know, someday, that what they heard those people saying and saw them doing were wrong–is not nothing.