Bad

How’s everybody doing? If you’re anything like me, the answer to that question is: bad. I’m doing bad. Or “badly,” if you prefer, although I think bad in the non-adverbial form best describes my state. I am bad. Not ill, not unwell. Just bad. In the depths, so to speak. In a funk. A miasma. A torpor. Is “torporous” a word? If not, I nominate it on behalf of all Americans.

I recall this same torporous feeling from eight years ago, when a newly elected president attempted a travel ban on people from seven predominately Muslim countries, arguing that such a ban was needed to combat “radical Islamic terrorism,” despite a report from the Department of Homeland Security concluding that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” The Supreme Court blocked that first action, but Trump would continue to modify his Executive Order two more times before they finally acquiesced.

This was the week that, eight years ago, Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm the unqualified Betsy DeVos to be Education Secretary. She would go on to have a terrible run, including her memorable suggestion that some schools should have guns in them to protect from “grizzly bears.” I wish I were making that up. This was the week that Pence was also selected to head a “voter-fraud inquiry,” to determine why Hillary Clinton beat him by three million votes in the popular vote. No voter fraud was found.

One grimly hilarious aside from the news eight years ago; Vladimir Putin demanded an apology from Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly after O’Reilly called Putin a “killer” during a Super Bowl interview with Trump. "We consider such words by the Fox News company correspondent to be unacceptable and insulting," the Kremlin said. Putin went on to kill tens of thousands of his own troops and tens of thousands of Ukrainians. I’m not including the many Russians who have fallen out of windows.

Photo of the author.

At the time, I remember the dizzying sense that – to paraphrase the film title - everything was happening everywhere all at once. Jokes about “Earth 1” and “Earth 2” began popping up on the fun social media site Twitter, and it really did feel like we were living in an alternate reality, a reality in which, somehow, a racist game show host had just been elected President of the United States. The mayhem of his first few weeks in office had not subsided; it never would. At least, we thought, the nation will wake up to the peril. At least, we thought, we will never have to go through this again.

Part of what’s got me feeling so bad is that we didn’t learn our lesson the first time around. If anything, America dug even deeper into our grievances. Trump came into office the first time promising to make America great. He left a million dead Americans in his wake, many of whom were victims of his inept handling of a situation for which he was woefully prepared, a virus that didn’t care about Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.”

“We have contained this,” said Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow almost four years ago to the day. “I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.” He went on to say that the virus would not be an economic tragedy.

For those of you who are not professional historians, the virus was not contained. And it did become an economic tragedy, a tragedy which President Joe Biden fixed. The so-called “soft landing” that economists said was impossible. Joe Biden gave us the softest of landings and the nation handed him his head as a reward.

(Although, to be fair, he sharpened their knife.)

Are we just stupid? Have years of conservative biliousness left us so incapable of discriminating between fact and fiction that we’re unable to even remove our thumbs from our own assholes? I know, I know. The right will say the same about everybody else. The problem with that argument is reality.

Last night, Martha expressed optimism that Americans would soon come to their senses. While I appreciate her brighter outlook than my own, I do not share it. As long as there are white people with cable TV and an internet connection, we’re condemned to not only repeat history, but worsen it.

To be back here again, with this same vituperative bobblehead sitting behind the Resolute desk, is maddening. And deeply, deeply sad. So yeah, I’m not doing great. Thankfully, I still have a couple days left to eat baguettes and camembert an ocean away from our collective madness. But American insanity, like the coronavirus, does not respect borders. I am infected. I suspect you are as well. Unfortunately, this novel American virus cannot be treated with a vaccine. There’s no vaccine for stupidity. No vaccine against cruelty. Or racism. Or ineptitude. Or fascism. The only tool we have to fight those things is the hard-won experience of defeating it before. And so we now we have to do it again.

Will we learn our lesson this time? Not likely, no. A nation whose own history is now being purged will never learn its lesson. The best that we can hope for is to muddle through for the moment and hope that the damage will be as minimal as possible. Three weeks in and we’re beginning to see some resistance. That was to be expected. As week four begins in a couple days, the question on my mind is how that resistance will be met. I think it’s a question weighing on the minds of brighter people than myself. How will be doing seven days from now? If history is any indication, bad.