Anxiety Eve
Your life will always be yours
This morning, when I went to make coffee, the remains of an evening were waiting downstairs — proof of life. My biggest regret of 2016 is buying into the toxicity narrative. It was so in, at that time, that certain people merited disqualification from your life. Not just Trump voters, per se (estranged family aside, I knew only two or three), but anyone who made you feel uncomfortable, anyone who might challenge you. In my case, it meant anyone who didn’t share my narrative of what had happened on November 8. Like an idiot, I threw people out. I isolated and formed a coterie, a bubble.
If you think this way, you will continuously pare away lives from yours, which is another way of saying your life will always shrink.
How I spent my time in those days was largely in (hideously online) disbelief. The electors were really going to go through with it?1 The White House was briefing him on the transfer of power? Nothing in our constitution or in our government could stop this? Masha Gessen did warn us, but I didn’t want to believe them: “Institutions will not save you.”
Eight years later, I’m well aware of what institutions in America are, and how feebly they bleat their platitudes. The media, especially, is something I’ve spent a long time thinking about (and writing about). I don’t think I’m alone, either, in finding in all of this a perverse sort of education — which is to say you aren’t alone in having learned how fascism builds momentum in plain sight. If, starting tomorrow, the electoral votes roll in and they count Trump as the president elect, it will be awful but it won’t be a shock. We’ll have been here before, and we’ll know how the story will start to spin.
This will be what America wants, newspapers will tell us. This is who we are, columnists will say. Pundits will look into the camera and say that our country is experimenting with a different approach, or the age of liberalism is over, or the journey we all began on September 11 from freedom toward security will have arrived at its iron bars, and so on. That kind of palaver. The great thing about the second act, if you’re bored with the first, is that you don’t have to pay attention. You can unsubscribe. You can change the channel. You can leave the theater altogether. If this is where we’re at, a few weeks from now, it will be the media (or really, the billionaires who own the media) who’ll have put us here; and none of us has to watch as the man who enchanted them severs their access, one outlet at a time. None of us has to accept 24/7 Trump TV for another four (and more) years. I don’t have to go through that again, and neither do any of you.
I know this seems defeatist. Bleak. Maybe nihilistic. What I hope is that all the polls are wrong and that we’ll never again have to hear from this bloated fascist with bleached assholes for eyes. But hope hasn’t worked out for me, not for a long time. I’m not letting myself get surprised again, nor am I letting myself get angry at those who disagree with me as to how to use or not use their vote, how to use or not use their speech. A Trump win will be traumatic, but I don’t have to embrace being traumatized.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do, if it happens — how I’m going to act, who I’m going to spend time with, where to direct my protests, and how to govern my own life. Because it is mine, just as your life is yours. This is the most elemental form of agency: You decide how you spend your time.
Last night, I made a chicken liver parfait and an onion soup. We had friends over and we ate and drank and talked. That’s my idea of a good time, even in periods of intense stress and anxiety — as the last several weeks (or the last eight years) have been, each worse, it seems, than the last. It was a lovely thing to see, when I woke up — the iridescent smudges on the wine glasses, the flecks of brothy fat in the cocottes, the crumpled napkins, the empty bottle, that one uneaten crust of bread. That’s all I wanted to say. Sometimes that’s all there is.
I wrote to the electors in several swing states and even received one reply. They would do their sworn duty and vote for Trump, they said — in comic sans, with a little winking emoji at the end.
"So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do, if it happens . . . ." You and me both!
I am in a privileged position, retired with financial security and Medicare (thank you, LBJ), so I don't need to worry about my job, a mortgage, the cost of bringing up kids. Yeah, bread and bacon cost a little more, but my Social Security check has kept pace. So I too can still envision having friends over for dinner, enjoying an evening together, and cleaning up afterwards - although probably that night rather than the next morning. And yes, I have come understand that my moral conscience has been unfairly exposed to distant injustice and unthinkable cruelty by living in a world of national and global media, atrocities over which I have no control, no way to influence, no way to change for the better. The question then arises what to think about the gap between one's moral conscience and one's inability to do anything about the immorality one witnesses. Kant's Categorical Imperative works in my private life, but not when I witness distant trauma. Still, to put it crassly, is it acceptable that I throw and enjoy dinner parties while I know an immigrant's life is being destroyed by sudden deportation or a January 6 felon is pardoned and released to do more of the same?? I have no answers, only that I'm sure that any academic dinner conversation over wine would still leave me the following morning not with dishes to do but with scruples and unease. Somehow that moral compass keeps pointing north regardless of where you are.
This is a really lovely piece & I loved the closing line. As someone who’s not in the US - I feel for you all, and subsequently, the rest of us for whatever happens. And I agree with your messaging - time is our own, no matter how much some people in power try to suggest otherwise!