Reflections on a Gray Day

Alan Bennett writes in his diary for 10 November 2016, "One way of going on post-Trump, though it’s hardly a solution, is to live without news: no papers, no TV, no comment. Not hard to do that for the four days we are here [in Venice] . . . But after that? It’s not something I want to get used to, or for the outrage, the disgust, the despair to become blunted. Better raw. Trudging painfully through the streets, up and down the steps to the bridges for what must surely be the last time, I think that even this will be at the mercy of Trump’s folly.” I appreciate Bennett’s despair and disgust and even the prescience of his fears before Trump’s exist from the Paris climate accords. For most of my adult life I have read the New York Times, sometimes assiduously and sometimes somewhat casually. But both then and now, since the appearance of Donald Trump first on the political scene and then as President, I have slowly stopped looking at the front section of the paper, all the news that’s fit to print, because whatever is printed outrages, disgusts and disheartens me. Reading the mean-spirited, often slanderous language spewing from Trump’s mouth I feel dirtied, somewhat soiled, as if I had stepped in dog excrement in the street as a result of someone not picking up after their pet. I can’t begin to recount the horrors of that man and his revolting sycophants, but this one baffles me and I can’t understand how this could occur, but this week Lynn Cheney, whose ideologies I mostly do not support, was told she could no longer be a Republican in Wyoming even though at least until the mid-term elections she is the elected Republican representative from Wyoming. Groucho said it best: I wouldn’t belong to any club that would me as a member! What the Wyoming Republicans  don’t seem to like is her well-publicized disgust with and actions resisting Donald Trump and his sycophants. Like many of us, she is terrified that our democracy is threatened by the machinations and treasonous actions of Trump and his vicious horde. The man has no shame, his narcissism is pathological. The Republicans follow his lead. The only RINOs I see are them. Ted Cruz even went after Big Bird; Jim Jordan is dangerous. Mitch McConnell cares only about power. Paul Gosar posted a threatening image of killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening President Biden, and the Republican leadership, men like Kevin McCarthy and its women like Marjorie Taylor Greene, not only refuse to condemn him but make excuses for him by blaming the victim!! Oh yes, environment does remind me of the lead up to the Nazification of German in the 1930s. and we know what came out of that regime. What I have been considering is that Trump has made it possible for Republicans to shed their sheep’s clothing and be the wolves that they are. Now they can be the fascists in public that they have been in secret. It is not concern for the country about which they might be known, but by their naked grasping for power for the sake of power. And with that power they can make the world safe for white, heterosexual, good old American males.
           A story is told: Towards the end of World War II a German wandered down the bomb-scarred streets of Berlin. He stopped at various news kiosks examining only the front pages of the newspapers on display. When asked what he was looking for he responded “the death notices.” Oh, the proprietor said, the death notices aren’t listed on the front page, but the man responded, “The death notice I’m looking for will be on Page One alright.” I look at the front page daily with some small glimmer of hope, but stop when the death notice I’m looking for doesn’t appear, and I then turn to the Arts section and bemoan over the movies I will never see protecting myself yet from the coronavirus.