There is dementia—not galloping, but definitely present, definitely cantering along—in both Geri’s and my family. After a visit in 2019, and a number of returns, to Spain and Portugal , we’ve both taken up language study. It’s supposed to keep the neurons firing. Portuguese me, Spanish her. Our son lives in France, has lived there five years so far. He is, in fact, planning on applying for citizenship soon. I won’t deny that we both would like to be closer to him in our waning years. Alas, French is an impossible language. As Steve Martin says, you could hurt yourself trying to speak it. And we prefer Iberian weather anyway. So. Anyway. We are learning Portuguese and Spanish, respectively.
We each have native language–speaking friends we talk to every week to up our game. As one might expect, discussion of politics and world events is hard to avoid. I recently had a friend in Lisbon tell me something people say in Portuguese:
“Os idiotas vão dominar o mundo; não pela capacidade, mas pela quantidade. Eles são muitos.”
“The idiots will take over the world. Not because they’re competent, but because they are so many of them.”
Moving right along . . .
Once again, I find myself writing for the generation after the generation after mine—the people living in the dying woods under an implacable sun, and the only living things with a bright future being the bugs and maybe . . . algae? Once again, I’m asking forgiveness of these 22nd-century humans. We were only human ourselves. Which, apparently, does not mean particularly clever. The decision to call ourselves Homo sapiens might have been a little hasty, in retrospect.
For those close to me, again, who are getting exactly what you voted for, another reminder: you have grandparents and great uncles and aunts who fought a war that was started by countries whose citizens thought the way you did. Whose people were tired of the complications of democracy, who started thinking that lots of problems would be solved if they could just get rid of the mooching foreigners and the know-it-all professors and the godless artists and, of course, the perverts. Americans died fighting people like you who called the hellscape they’d created “purified Western civilization.”
So here we are with a mad king with bone spurs who’s trying to show Bush I and II how to really do a war. You turn on your allies of 70 years, you threaten to invade their land, and you bomb a regional power to strategically cause as much worldwide chaos as you can, and guarantee it to last until at least fifty years after you’re dead. You spend hundreds of millions a day from the get-go, you get Americans killed immediately, and you let your military commanders tell their troops they’re fighting a holy war to bring in the End Times. Seriously. This is happening. I never expected to see the day the US military would go all in on dispensationalist theology.
Have we already forgotten Portland and Minneapolis? Yes and no. On March 28, there’s going to be another nationwide protest. Organizers are aiming for nine million around the country, with Minneapolis an especially important hub. Even if they don’t get that many folks, just to put things in perspective: the famous 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and which had historic outcomes, most famously the Civil Rights Act, had a quarter million people. The Million Man March in 1995 didn’t quite get a million, probably closer to 750,000. So even if the next No Kings March gets in the ballpark of nine million, it’s going to be hard for any American to say anymore that he or she “isn’t into politics.” You, my friend, are in the doo-doo of politics whether you choose to be or not. And if you don’t vote in the fall, you’re still voting.
What effect Trump’s madness, and the protests, has on the fall elections is anybody’s guess. And what effect the elections—even if there’s a Blue Tidal Wave—will have on Trump’s actual (as opposed to legitimate) power is also anybody’s. I do agree, though, we’re in the End of Days. At least America’s. Our elections from now on are going to be like those in Venezuela or Turkey. Always disputed, never again legitimate for the party out of power. Every four years there will be an angry crowd at the Capitol gates. From now on. Even if someday the rule of law is somewhat restored, and we have a government that doesn’t keep us awake at night, no democracies left in the world will trust us for at least a generation, though likely longer.
I don’t know what good speaking Portuguese and Spanish is going to do Geri and me in such a world, whether we stay or whether we go. Do we even want to avoid dementia? The whole globe, thanks to you who didn’t like Kamala Harris’s laugh, who preferred Donald Trump because he “tells it like it is,” is quickly turning to ash.
Should I up my meds? Probably. It might help you, though, to every day keep your grandchildren’s adulthood in mind. Especially in November.