This is Fine

Yet again, I’m stunned by my lack of imagination. I never imagined an American secret police force beating up people without pretext and disappearing them into the bowels of a corrupted American judicial system. Even after seeing it happen again and again in other countries, my own stupidity prevented me from allowing myself to believe it would ever happen here. Even when I made the argument on TV and in my writing that it could happen on our streets should we re-elect Laura Loomer’s crush, I didn’t fully reckon with the possibility that it would.

Now that it is happening, my brain still resists. Still holds onto the misbegotten idea that we’re, somehow, better than this. That my neighbors wouldn’t throw on neck garters and Oakleys and maul people on the streets without charge. Even as I write these words, my brain is casting around for some reason why such a thing might be happening other than the reason that it is: because some people want nothing more in this life than to hurt other people.

Police Academy 9 - Dipshits on patrol. Photo Carl Stiehl/Los Angeles Times

Now the National Guard is out on the streets of American cities. Bored 18 and 19-year-old kids patrolling the nation’s capital for no reason than to satisfy the malicious whims of a malevolent administration. Today we’re being told that, contrary to earlier claims, the Guard will now be armed. Teenagers with submachine guns getting heckled by sandwich-throwers doesn’t sound like it will end well. Which, of course, is exactly the point.

Even now, my imagination reels against the larger implications of what we’re witnessing. We’ve got Republican lawmakers on TV baldly stating they want federal occupations of major American cities, all of which are run by Democrats, none of which have comparable crime rates to their Red State counterparts. You’ve probably seen Tim Burchett talking about being so terrified to leave his office that he sleeps there. Never mind that his home city of Knoxville, TN is way more violent than DC per capita. Facts don’t care about your feelings, they say, though they’re more than happy to allow their feelings to trump the facts when it suits their purposes. Almost like they do with the Bible. Funny, that.

I’ve been loath to project too far forward into the future, but it now appears to me that the United States is girding for battle. I don’t know what the nature of that battle will look like, but we’ve got multiple states ripping up their congressional maps. We’ve got Ka$h Patel reorganizing the FBI as a domestic police force. We’ve got judges sniping at each other in their opinions and an administration slow-walking or ignoring rulings they don’t like. And we’ve got tubby dudes in cargo shorts and tactical vests tasing delivery guys on the street for no reason. The law has devolved into suggestion. Applicable when it suits the whims of those in power, nonapplicable when it does not.

When does one start catastrophizing? When the catastrophe is fully open us or when it’s only in its early stages? I feel like my friends in LA watching brushfires in the hills and wondering when it’s time to grab a bag and go. Is it time to grab a bag and go?

The wife and I seriously entertained leaving the country. I haven’t yet shared this publicly, but when we toured France last January, it was with the intention of moving there permanently. Did we make a mistake by deciding against it?

I think about refugees from around the world weighing the same decisions. Do we stay? Do we go? How bad is it likely to get? My mind still doesn’t allow me to consider that we might end up like the Philippines under Duarte, with people being murdered by the thousands despite the fact that Trump praised Duarte for doing “an unbelievable job.” The International Criminal Court has estimated that Duarte killed anywhere from 12-30,000 of his own people between 2016-2019. The Philippines’ population is about 1/3 of ours, so you can do the math on that.

Having never lived through an authoritarian regime before, I’m confused about when to ring the alarm and how loud to ring it. Yes, we’ve all seen the images I described, but my personal experience in cities across the country doesn’t yet comport with the violence I’m seeing on the screen. I’m writing these words from a comedy club in Denver. It’s a gorgeous Colorado day and pretty soon the place will be filled with happy (I hope) attendees. I’ll tell jokes for an hour and I probably won’t even mention this president or his Botoxed band of toadies. So how bad could it be?

But that’s not the question, is it? The question is how bad will it get? Because for a lot of people it’s already bad enough. For trans people and immigrants and anybody with skin a shade darker than my own, it’s already not great and getting not greater by the minute. And yet my brain still refuses to believe it can get much worse. Even as they’re building the camps and rounding up folks and promising more to come. With all of that, the greater part of my stupid brain is going, “I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”

I’m haunted by a moment I had right after Trump got elected the first time around. I was doing a book event for my parody book, A Child’s First Book of Trump, and an older gentleman in the audience asked if I thought he would bring fascism to the USA, specifically of the German variety. I pointed out that while Trump certainly seemed to have fascistic tendencies, I argued that our own nation wouldn’t allow him to get away with too much because of our long democratic traditions, the fact that our economy was more stable than Weimar Germany’s, and that, because we have the benefit of hindsight, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes as Germany circa 1933. What haunts me about that moment wasn’t my answer – it was my surety.

I still don’t think we’ll go nearly that far. I can’t think that or I wouldn’t still be on these shores. But, like you, I don’t know how bad it’s going to get. I just know that right now it’s bad. And, in a minute or two, I’m going to walk out on a stage and help people forget about the badness for an hour. Tomorrow they will turn the screws a little tighter and I’ll still be here trying to convince myself it won’t get any worse.