The Working People podcast chats with Michele Manco, a clinical social worker in the Bronx with years of experience working in psychiatric emergency and crisis settings. We talk about Michele’s life and the road that led her to being a social worker, the history of social work itself, and the very real struggles and often harsh circumstances that are a daily reality for social workers and the people they serve. (Content warning: This conversation does broach topics involving psychiatric distress and suicide.)
António Guterres lists human-inflicted wounds on natural world in stark message
Humanity is facing a new war, unprecedented in history, the secretary-general of the UN has warned, that is in danger of destroying our future before we have fully understood the risk.
The stark message from António Guterres follows a year of global upheaval, with the coronavirus pandemic causing governments to shut down whole countries for months at a time, while wildfires, hurricanes and powerful storms have scoured the globe.
More than three weeks after major media outlets declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election and a week after the General Services Administration allowed the transition to begin taking place, Donald Trump still hasn’t conceded. Instead, he and his allies have amped up their increasingly extreme rhetoric and have shown no indication of bowing down to reality.
Take, for example, Trump campaign attorney Joe diGenova, who on Monday called for Chris Krebs—the former cybersecurity official whom Trump axed after Krebs publicly rejected the president’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud—to be “taken out at dawn and shot.”
Or take Sidney Powell—the former Trump legal team member, current conspiracy theorist, and proprietor of an absolutely unhinged Twitter account. On Monday, she retweeted a post calling on Trump to suspend the Electoral College vote and subsequent presidential inauguration and set up military tribunals to investigate the 2020 election. Trump’s campaign has distanced itself from Powell, but she’s still a frequent contributor to Fox Business and has more than a million followers on Twitter.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to use his favorite social media platform to post lies about the election, only for Twitter to plaster them with misinformation warning labels. On Tuesday, after falsely claiming that the election results in Nevada and Michigan were incorrect, Trump set his sights on Georgia, which will hold two US Senate run-off elections that will determine the balance of power in the upper chamber. “You allowed your state to be scammed,” Trump wrote, taggingGeorgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican. “We must check signatures and count signed envelopes against ballots. Then call off election. It won’t be needed. We will all WIN!”
Trump was presumably suggesting that by throwing out enough Democratic ballots, Republican officials could push GOP Sen. David Perdue over the 50-percent threshold he’d need to avoid a runoff against his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. (A Libertarian candidate winnowed Perdue’s share of the votes down to 49.7 percent, and in Georgia, a candidate needs a majority to win.) But even if Trump’s claims of a scam were true, there would still be a Georgia runoff in the special election between Democrat Raphael Warnock and the state’s other incumbent GOP senator, Kelly Loeffler. It seems likely that, at least until the Electoral College meets on December 14, Trump and his team are going to continue grasping at straws.
As part of our end of year sale, we are posting excerpts from some of our new titles. In this excerpt from The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, the Care Collective looks at why we need to move away from the nuclear family as the assumed basic unit of care and how to envision a society where care is prioritized.
Until January 4, 2021 at 11:59PM EST we have 40% off ALL our books! See our End of Year Highlights, and our Gift Guide: packed full of recommendations.
Uncaring Communities
Tragically, this deliberate rolling back of public welfare provision and resources, replaced by global corporate commodity chains, has generated profoundly unhealthy community contexts for care. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the social care sector itself. The corporate seizure of care homes from the public sector – a process enabled and imposed by government policies – has meant that the people being ‘cared for’ in their own communities are often neglected. The capacities of those employed to provide care are severely diminished through ongoing exploitation, understaffing, poor pay, time constraints, inadequate or non-existent job security and a lack of training and support.7
Moreover, the loss of smaller and local providers, which were often firmly embedded in the community they served, further contributes to the unravelling of community ties. The outsourcing of ‘hands-on’ care provision is, however, just one of the ways in which neoliberalism evacuates possibilities for maintaining community care. At the same time, we have also witnessed a massive contraction of public space, as corporations and private-sector actors have bought up and then privatised spaces that were once commonly owned and used by the people in the community. After the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986, for example, the large and handsome municipal County Hall and its surroundings, on the South Bank of the Thames, were sold off to a Japanese entertainment company.8
The decimation of public spaces renders a sense of communal life increasingly difficult. There are fewer places for people to congregate, whether for relaxation and enjoyment, or to discuss issues of common concern or participate in collaborative projects. This heightens the competitive individualism that so often leads to loneliness and isolation, while having devastating repercussions for our ability to participate in democratic decision-making.
Fewer community resources, a culture that places profit over people, and a social and political landscape that incites us to focus on our individual selves has meant that cultivating community ties, which enhance democracy, has become ever harder. Such a care-less world creates fertile conditions for the growth of notoriously uncaring communities that base their sense of shared identity on exclusion and hatred – misogynist incel and white nationalist groups being paradigmatic examples. Moreover, careless communities focus on investing in policing and surveillance rather than in social provisions to promote human flourishing. And as carelessness takes hold in so many domains of life, and as community ties are profoundly weakened, the family is often encouraged to step in as society’s preferred infrastructure of care.
Careless Kinships
The traditional nuclear family still provides the prototype for care and for contemporary notions of kinship, all stemming from the mythic ramifications of the first ‘maternal bond’. This remains true even as queer people have been increasingly incorporated into the mainstream – on the condition that they reproduce the traditional nuclear-family model. Our circles of care have not broadened out but have, in fact, become painfully narrow.
These caring arrangements are unreliable and unjust. The nuclear family cannot be the assumed basic unit of care, nor can market outsourcing be the solution to the gender inequality of current care expectations or practices. In both cases, after all, women end up doing the lion’s share of both unpaid and paid care work (two-thirds of paid and three-quarters of unpaid care work globally). Why should women have to do all this care work? And what if you don’t have a family that can support you – what if your family has rejected you, or you have rejected them? What if you cannot afford to pay for privatised care services? At best, the consequences of this regime of care have often led to the neglect and isolation of those most in need of care, and at worst to needless sickness and death. The neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of ‘care for one’s own’ that has become one of the launch pads for the recent rise of hard-right populism across the globe. And this brings us full circle – from the global lack of care to the reliance on the traditional family – underscoring how the different scales we outline here are all intimately and inextricably related.
As we live through the ascendancy of far-right populism and the uncertainty of a post-pandemic world, the idea of care has been so diminished that it tends to mean care exclusively for and about ‘people like us’. In what is a truly horrifying situation, the populist state actually strengthens itself the more it produces spectacles of indifference to the ‘different’. Only a minority of us, apparently, feel upset when migrant infants are ripped away from their families; or when entire ecosystems burn to the ground as a result of climate change, or, as in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, are deliberately destroyed to make way for neoliberal capitalist ventures. One of the images that has come to define Trump’s America is of US First Lady Melania Trump visiting a shelter that housed refugee children separated from their families, wearing a jacket with the words ‘I Really Don’t Care. Do U?’ scrawled in big white letters. ‘Really not caring’ is presented by the right as a form of ‘realism’; strong evidence of what we term the banality of carelessness. It also shows how crucial the question of dependency, and interdependency, is for our societies and our lives, at every single level, and the multiple destructions caused when these interdependencies are denied.
The Solution
How do we even begin to address the pervasiveness of carelessness? We suggest that we can do so by building on a wealth of examples of what we call ‘care-in-practice’, from the radical past to the recent present, when care has come to prominence as a vital force during the coronavirus emergency. In what follows, we offer a progressive vision of a world that takes the idea of care as its organising principle seriously, an idea that has been repudiated and disavowed for too long. This vision advances a model of ‘universal care’: the ideal of a society in which care is placed front and centre on every scale of life. Universal care means that care – in all its various manifestations – is our priority not only in the domestic sphere but in all spheres: from our kinship groups and communities to our states and planet. Prioritising and working towards a sense of universal care – and making this common sense – is necessary for the cultivation of a caring politics, fulfilling lives, and a sustainable world.
Achieving this vision of universal care is of course as challenging as it is pressing. It will involve avowing our mutual interdependencies and embracing the ubiquitous ambivalences at the heart of care and caregiving. It will mean ensuring that care is distributed in an egalitarian way – neither assumed to be unproductive and primarily women’s work by nature, nor, when paid, carried out mostly by women who are poor, immigrant, or of colour. The goal is to ensure that the whole of society shares care’s multiple joys and burdens. Across different scales of life, this vision translates into reimagining the limits of familial care to encompass more expansive or ‘promiscuous’ models of kinship; reclaiming forms of genuinely collective and communal life; adopting alternatives to capitalist markets and resisting the marketisation of care and care infrastructures; restoring, invigorating and radically deepening our welfare states; and, finally, mobilising and cultivating radical cosmopolitan conviviality, porous borders and Green New Deals at the transnational level.
In his latest book, “Revenge Capitalism,” Max Haiven sets out to assemble different stories about capitalism’s past and present to challenge its own account of itself.
Miss Navajo Nation Shaandiin P. Parrish distributes food, water, and other supplies to Navajo families on May 27, 2020 in Huerfano on the Navajo Nation Reservation, New Mexico. | Sharon Chischilly/Getty Images
Novelist Tommy Orange on whether racial justice protests and Covid-19 disparities bring a new perspective to the holiday.
The myth of Thanksgiving, a tale of a peacemaking repast between white colonizers and Native Americans, has long been debunked for its historical inaccuracies. But to reckon with the holiday is to understand how it helped set off a painful history of trauma — massacres, abuse, and negligence — that Native Americans still carry 400 years later.
In his 2018 novel There There, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tommy Orange tells the story of the challenges Native Americans, especially those who live in cities, continue to face. He connects the characters’ journeys of cultural and self-discovery through the lens of generational trauma; the book’s prologue captures the gruesome history of Thanksgiving and Indigenous erasure, from the forced removal of Native American communities from their ancestral lands to current instances of cultural appropriation.
Today, much of the truth of Native American history is still left out of the country’s education system. Meanwhile, Indigenous affairs are minimally covered in the media. This is despite a year that has asked for reflection and action in terms of reexamining the country’s racist past — protests for racial justice swept the country this summer, and the Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected Indigenous communities and other communities of color. That many American families are still planning to gather this Thanksgiving, despite the risks to the most vulnerable in our communities, is a flashback for many to white settlers spreading deadly diseases that diminished Native populations.
“If Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude and a communal sense of being together, if we can think that way as a country, Covid-19 is one of the lessons where we can learn to think of other people and not ourselves first,” Orange told Vox. “That would be my biggest hope. But I don’t know how much of that is happening.”
I talked to Orange about self-reflection during a time of racial reckoning, why Thanksgiving is still a widely celebrated holiday, and the upcoming sequel to his novel. Our interview has been edited and condensed.
Rachel Ramirez
In your book There There, the prologue speaks to the true history of Thanksgiving. How should that excerpt, plus the overall message of your book — the generational trauma Native Americans face in their daily lives — translate to people’s understanding of Thanksgiving in relation to Native Americans today?
Tommy Orange
My son’s 9, and we’ve seen him go through public school, and we could see the warning signs and the way they were going to teach Thanksgiving and what it means historically. It’s indoctrination. Creepy is the way I feel about the way the lie is taught as if it’s the truth. We’re still so far from acknowledging something that seems basic to so many of us. So we just pulled him out of school the first year for the whole week, because we didn’t want him to have to interface with that.
For my son, the next three years, we brought up a Native guy from Oakland who powwow dances, he sings and he drums, and his family dances. He had the kids ask questions about Native culture. He was able to, in a really compassionate way, address a lot of these misunderstandings and the way the general population thinks of Native people —areally monolithic version of what being native is.
Knopf
In the book, I was just trying to bring something up that has to do with the way we look at history. Americans didn’t care about Thanksgiving until Abraham Lincoln kind of breathed life back into it in order to mend the nation during the Civil War, to give us something to celebrate together. It could be a really cool opportunity for us to do the same thing now, around another civil discord, Civil War-feeling moment in the country with how divided we are — for us to leave Thanksgiving in the same spirits together and decide it’s a stupid American holiday that is really hurtful to a lot of people and was never founded in anything patriotic or true.
Rachel Ramirez
How do you usually spend the holiday week?
Tommy Orange
Well, I grew up celebrating it. My dad didn’t have any problems with it. My dad wasn’t an activist or overtly political in that way. He’s thoroughly a Democrat and very distrustful of the government, but it’s a really easy holiday to celebrate, because you get to eat great food and hang out with your family. Nobody likes to hate on Thanksgiving, because everyone kind of loves it for those good reasons.
But I stopped celebrating it in the past 10 years, and it’s a struggle with in-laws who don’t understand discontinuing wanting to celebrate it. So it’s always kind of an awkward time, but I think it’s really easy this year because of the pandemic. In the past, we’ve made a point to not do anything in particular, just enjoy the day off —includingnot supporting the Thanksgiving industry, which is buying all the Thanksgiving food, which is one of the many things that continues to support it as a holiday. We’ve gone to the movies different years. We’ve, like I said, just enjoyed the day together.
Rachel Ramirez
With the protests this summer, and the racial reckoning America is slowly having, how do you think the current climate will inform the holiday this year?
Tommy Orange
Right now, the way it feels to me is it’s fallen beyond surreal into absurd. People are holding on so tightly to their traditions under the guise of patriotism, even willing to die from it. I would hope that a lot is going to change because of what’s come out in 2020. I would hope that … [amid]the sort of economic collapse like the Great Depression, that social change willhappen after these devastating historical moments. I’m still holding my breath about a lot, waiting to see what will happen. I’m pretty fatigued.
I can’t say that I’m hopeful that this will mean people will rethink Thanksgiving and Native history. I don’t feel like I’m at a place where I’m allowing myself to hope like that. But I do feel like with all the awareness that’s come up in 2020, for some people, it’s an easy “cancel Thanksgiving” answer. Though I don’t think there isenough progress to be noted, and I’m not trying to be completely cynical. It’s just when we’re divided as we are as a country, and when you still have the people in power that are sort of under the guise of this tradition and patriotism and noble country, it’s hard to feel anything but cynicism.
Rachel Ramirez
How should people take this time to reflect and reexamine the brutal history surrounding Thanksgiving?
Tommy Orange
I’m going to sound cynical again, but anybody who’s taking the time to reflect probably already did enough of reflection this year — if not many, many years before — and is not actively celebrating it in a problematic way that you would need reflection to change. And anybody who does not get into their reflective state, because of what this all means, they don’t give a shit. They’re flying across the country during a pandemic to be patriotic. They’re going to gorge themselves on turkey and gravy.
This is a side of the country I can’t really understand. So I trust that people who are already reflective aren’t doing it in a disrespectful or stupid way, and the people that do will just continue to do that. I don’t see a lot of movement from the other side for this to be an opportunity for them to change their thinking. It feels really hard to reach across and make that kind of gesture during this time.
Rachel Ramirez
Like you said, many American families will be gathering for the holiday, despite health officials’ warnings not to. Meanwhile, Covid-19 is still a major issue disproportionately impacting Indian Country. Can you speak on how historical and current injustices have left Native communities vulnerable in the pandemic and how people can bring light to this?
Tommy Orange
The invisibility of Native issues seems to be a constant. The way that people are thinking about taking the risks — considering the numbers of who it’s affecting more and considering overloading hospitals and affecting people who need medical care and older, vulnerable people — the opportunity to think about vulnerable people in a communal way, it’s really anti-American because we’re so individualistic. Me, me, me and now, now, now. I mean, if Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude and a communal sense of being together, if we can think that way as a country, Covid-19 is one of the lessons where we can learn to think of other people and not ourselves first. That would be my biggest hope. But I don’t know how much of that is happening.
It would be great if this just didn’t become a superspreader event. It’s not just them that’s going to be affected, it’s overloaded hospitals, and it’s going to affect other people.
Rachel Ramirez
Despite the pandemic, Native people turned out this election and were key in swing states like Arizona. How do you see the tribal nations’ relationship with the upcoming Biden administration?
Tommy Orange
Well, it’s good to hear during Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s speech even just the naming of Native Americans. Sometimes we get ignored, so it was good to hear us acknowledged. And I would hope that with Biden’s language around making the Cabinet and the administration look the way the country does — we are a big part of the country’s story, its narrative, its origins, and its present. We’re a smaller number than a lot of other minorities, but we’re an important part of the country. I would hope that moving forward, we could be included more than we had been.
Rachel Ramirez
What are you working on right now? What’s been keeping you busy?
Tommy Orange
I’m working on a sequel to There There. It’s supposed to come out in 2022, hopefully earlier in 2022 than later. So I’ve been deeply involved in getting that into as good shape as I can. The book goes into more history and also the aftermath of the powwow. It’s called Wandering Stars.
Laura Kipnis on JoAnn Wypijewski, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. What do recent sexual alarms reveal, or occlude, about America’s structural violence and unravelling social fabric?
In his latest anti-science appeal to Americans, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas on Monday night called on families to ignore the guidance of public health experts who say the holiday season should not include indoor gatherings — suggesting to Fox News that families should take the risk even for elderly or sick relatives this Thanksgiving because they will no longer be alive next year.
“This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don’t see your family at Thanksgiving,” Atlas, who has no public health expertise, told Fox host Martha MacCallum. “For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here?”
Stanford University, where Atlas was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution before joining President Donald Trump’s coronavirus team, promptly distanced itself from the doctor’s comments, while political observers expressed shock on social media.
Well, if it’s not their last Thanksgiving it will be now, “Doctor” Atlas. https://t.co/HSrWAu9i7o
Enough. Where is the AMA, The American Society of Neuroradiology, Stanford? This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now. https://t.co/hTmRq87nRt
Shorter Atlas. For a lot of these people it’ll be their last Thanksgiving … because they’re attending Thanksgiving. So bring on the Turkey. https://t.co/SUHcOuzRqG
Protecting the elderly from Covid-19 is one of the main reasons infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials have called on Americans to skip indoor family gatherings and traveling this year. Last week he advised Americans to wear face coverings at any gatherings they do have if they don’t know the Covid-19 status of all attendees.
Meanwhile, Atlas has falsely stated that face masks don’t reduce transmission of Covid-19 and is a proponent of the U.S. government taking a “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic — encouraging people who are relatively young and healthy to go about their daily lives with no regard for mask-wearing, social distancing, or the existence of a virus that’s killed more than 246,000 people in the U.S. this year, while using unspecified methods to separate them from people who are elderly or at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.
The “herd immunity” approach, euphemistically rebranded as “focused protection” by some proponents, has been denounced as “fringe” by seasoned public health officials.
On Sunday, Atlas also called on Michigan residents to “rise up” against public health guidance after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that in-person learning, indoor dining, organized sports, and other activities would be shut down for three weeks to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
“This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now,” tweeted one emergency room physician on Monday evening following Atlas’s comments about Thanksgiving.
Flags are an important part of fascism. I never realized how important until I was enveloped by them. Red Trump flags, and blue Trump flags. Red, white and blue American flags. Red Confederate flags. Blue police flags. Yellow “Come And Take It” flags, and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Flags on sticks, and flags on jackets, and flags wrapped around shoulders like shawls. Big flags, and bigger flags, and multiple flags stacked atop one another. The young man toting six full-sized flags on a towering, bending pole as he rode on an electric unicycle was impressive, until you saw the other young man standing atop the roof of his monster truck waving a gargantuan Trump flag as his sound system played pro-Trump rap music, framed by the backdrop of the sunset over the U.S. Capitol building. The back of the truck was full of more flags.
The Million MAGA March in Washington, DC on Saturday did not have a million people, but it had a million flags. You couldn’t take two steps without one of them smacking you in the face. Freedom Plaza, the block-sized elevated space where the faithful gathered, had the quality of a funhouse maze, with flags taking the place of mirrors. It was disorienting. A flash of red, a flash of blue, and in every direction, a sea of coronavirus. It was a situation built to instill the sort of overwhelming patriotism you feel right before you go to war and die.
On Saturday morning, downtown DC was even more deserted than usual, save for the knots of red-hatted tourists gravitating towards the White House, bustling through the empty, echoing blocks. As gangsters say during dangerous times, “Only cops and fools were on the streets.” As it grew closer to noon, the plaza took on the atmosphere of a county fair written by Stephen King, where all the barbecue stands were replaced with MAGA vendors and the square dance tent was an endless loop of Lee Greenwood. Women sang along to “I’m Proud to Be an American” as they waited in lines for the Port-o-lets. People shouted through megaphones about Joe Biden being a pedophile, to widespread acclaim. It was a big revival, a place for believers to bond. “My sister said her kids are gonna be ridiculed at school, and have to fight for their morals and values,” one middle-aged woman confided to her neighbor. “Oh honey,” the younger blonde woman in a red Trump beanie standing next to her commiserated, “We live in Delaware. It’s scarier there.”
The men all seemed to look like they hoped something violent would happen. America is a land that encourages martial fantasies, and here they all converged. There were lots of helmets and body armor and tactical vests and tactical gloves and tactical pants with lots of pockets and carabiners. Some of these men looked like they used to be in the military and missed the action, and others looked like they played a lot of Call of Duty and had elaborate war fantasies, but all of them seemed like the kind of person who would take a job as a jail guard in order to get the opportunity to beat someone. There were the Oath Keepers, hulking soldier types, and Proud Boys, the yellow-and-black-wearing celebs of the far-right, who people kept asking for selfies with; and there were little huddles of lesser gangs, the skinny “American Guard” guys carrying homemade shields, and the old men with “Sheepdog Nation” hoodies advertising itchy trigger fingers, and the bikers whose vests read “Born To Ride For 45” and whose patches read “Hillary Clinton American Traitor Bitch.” There were young tattooed guys walking around with boxing mouthguards in, and middle-aged men in “Q” shirts ranting on sidewalks, and countless thousands of men wearing baseball hats, beards, wraparound shades, and camo, the uniform of the delusional Protector class. There was a couple walking a Doberman wearing a harness that said “SECURITY.” The dog was clearly not Security. But it was part of the fantasy.
These were the shitkickers of America, and those that worshiped them. Nothing about them is hard to understand. If you have seen a high school bully and his crew of friends goading him on, you have encountered this type. What I cannot explain is why this juvenile sort of action movie mentality exerts such a strong hold on so many Americans. Maybe we have a crisis of masculinity, or maybe we are a damaged nation coping poorly with trauma, or maybe this is just our nature, dating back to the early explorers who sailed in to massacre the natives because they could. Maybe all of the above. What I do know is that there is a very powerful undercurrent running just below the surface of mainstream politics right now that can best be described as an overwhelming desire to have a reason to kill everyone on the other side. Perhaps it has been too long since we had a big war that required a draft, and all of that bloodlust is pouring into America itself, like an infection. We had the Communists as enemies, and then we had the terrorists, and now, lacking a distinct boogieman to soak up our aggression, we have thousands and thousands of people who dress up as soldiers and roam the streets of American cities, waiting to attack… whoever. Trump’s achievement has been to remove any real political pretext from our national political feud, leaving only a pile of hate that can be directed at any enemy that’s convenient. Antifascists? Black Lives Matter? Democrats, judges, the FBI, the Board of Elections? All can fit the description of “Enemies who don’t want America to be Great Again.” We left rationality behind a long time ago. Trump has succeeded in building his lunatic army. That was who this day was for.
The good news is that his army is not big enough. Tens of thousands of people showed up for the MAGA march, but most of them were just regular families whose brains have been poisoned by Facebook, or old people whose brains have been poisoned by Fox News. That so many of these people would feel it necessary to travel across the country to march up Constitution Avenue and inform the world that “I’d Rather Get Covid-19 Than Biden 20” is disturbing on a human level, but not cause for undue alarm. They wanted to parade past the Dear Leader’s barricaded hotel and genuflect to its facade, to grovel rather than to fight. The real shitkickers were a minority. If this was Trump’s rallying call for soldiers to rescue him from his electoral fate, it was not a success. The size of the Women’s March held the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 made this march look like an intimate gathering of friends, at a mental hospital.
By late afternoon, the MAGA people all trickled away, some of them making the mistake of walking through Black Lives Matter Plaza, where they were jeered at ruthlessly. They jeered right back. As darkness fell, a line of police took up positions across that Plaza, and two more lines of bike cops stood on K Street, keeping a small group of antifa people a full block away from the Trump people who were milling around by McPherson Square. A block north, at the Capital Hilton, more cops stood guard, as a group of MAGA people peered out the lobby window at the scene on the streets like visitors at the zoo. I stood around for an hour or so and saw nothing more violent than a college girl taunting a very embarrassed-looking riot cop for having something that looked like coke in his nose. Shortly after I left, bands of Proud Boys started marauding through downtown, beating people up. Someone got stabbed. All of this was amplified frantically on Twitter, and then amplified again by the President himself, but it was not out of the ordinary by the grim standards of 2020 street politics. Trying to understand an entire protest via Twitter is like trying to understand Moby Dick by repeating the phrase “Call me Ishmael” at higher and higher volumes until you are deaf. If you cede the totality of its meaning to the shitkickers, you are not trying to learn very much.
What people want, more than food and water and sex and drugs, is a purpose. They will attach themselves to all sorts of deranged things in order to feel like they are fulfilling that purpose—that they are a part of something meaningful. Donald Trump provided that for a very large number of people, and that fact alone should make all of us disappointed in this country. America has always seen its people as a means to an end, the end being money or war. It has never bothered to provide a mass purpose beyond that. Into that void stepped MAGA world, just the latest religion promising an explanation for our confused existence.
On the side of a street in downtown DC on Saturday morning sat a tiny woman wrapped in a TRUMP 2020 flag that was bigger than she was. She had stuck up hand-lettered cardboard signs on the bus shelter where she was laying. One of them read, “How in the Hell do undocumented people get Housing in the USA and Americans are homeless.” None of the MAGA people paid her any attention, and neither did anyone else.
JP Sottile
Are we simply just stuck in the middle seat between a lunatic (Trump) and scumbag (McConnell) on an insane airplane ride…. or is it something much more sinister?
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