Politics

Old Stories

| Rob Ehle

Before I forget, did you know you can subscribe to this blog? I’d forgotten that was a thing. Anyway, yeah. If you really want to punish yourself, there’s a button now at the bottom of the home page. Just put in your e-mail, and you’re part of the fan club. Speaking of subscribing . . .

I’ve been subscribing to The New Yorker magazine for maybe forty years now, but only in the last five years or so have I not been throwing out the issues. I do not know why this has happened. But now that it has, I’ve decided to make something of it and, every morning or two, I randomly choose from the stash one short story to read. I originally subscribed in my 20s as part of my personal Great Leap Forward, in which I was frantically trying to get up to speed on the tastes and lore of the Educated Class. I had been raised with books on our shelves, but besides Bibles and Bible commentaries, they were mainly the gilded spines of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Even at my Christian college, it began dawning on me that there was a whole group of Americans I’d been only dimly aware of who did not read the Reader’s Digest.

I’ve always said it is no mean thing to subscribe to The New Yorker solely for the cartoons. It’s a little profligate, given the amount of paper used on non-cartoon content, but it’s still worth the money. I think I first discovered New Yorker cartoons via an anthology at my friend’s mother’s house. They were the first cartoons, in my 19-year-old opinion (this was before The Far Side), that gave Peanuts a run for their money, though they obviously weren’t in the same race.

A tombstone inscribed, I Told You I Was Sick.

A king answers the phone: “It is we.”

And anything at all by George Booth. The best ones feature pronouncements shouted from the bathtub, electrical wiring not up to code, and/or constipated dogs.

As I began my New Yorker story devotional regimen, the first thing I realized was that I haven’t been at all rigorous even in the weekly cartoon review. Which of course is scandalous. There were complete issues in which there was not one cartoon I remembered. I blame social media, of course, and there can be nothing more damning of vacant-eyed scrolling through reels of dachshunds cocking their heads at giggling babies than the fact that I missed stuff like a gentleman and a lady at a mid–19th century soirée, in which the man introduces himself, “Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

Some stories are better than others, of course. There used to be a typical “New Yorker story,” though I’m not sure that’s a thing anymore, at least not in my reading over the last month. Think John Updike or John Cheever. White, middle-class suburbanites, cocktail parties, whatever drama there is is usually going on in someone’s head. Sometimes longer than they needed to be, or at least longer than people’s attention spans were getting to be. “Character driven.” Moody, ambiguous ending. If I’m making this kind of story sound like a crashing bore, I can assure you the best of them would stay with you for weeks. Forever, a couple of them. Cheever’s “The Country Husband” ends with a line that’s become one of my favorite last sentences in all short fiction:

“Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

I don’t know, maybe you had to be there. I’m a great sucker for Cheever. But then I’m an almost 68-year-old middle class white man. The New Yorker has moved on. The most “New Yorker” story I’ve seen in the old vein has been maybe “Understanding the Science,” by Camille Bordas (December 15, 2025), which takes place at a dinner party in an upper middle class Chicago apartment. The main difference is the reference to global warming. Otherwise, it’s still dinner parties and all the action is interior. Pretty good, especially in its send-up of a narcissistic movie star.

I loved “Unreasonable,” Rivka Galchen (9/29/25), which I almost skipped because there is early reference to the current political situation, something I’m generally trying to use fiction to turn away from. But that’s getting harder and harder, even in made-up stories. I’m glad I kept going. A mother, who is a bee scientist, has two daughters, and there’s lots of stuff about bees and lots of stuff about daughters, and it’s just so great. Did you know there are approximately 18,000 (or maybe 180,000? I’m too lazy to skim the story to verify) species of bee, and only a minority of them are social insects? Did you know daughters can be quite self-involved, whether they are ten years old or 21? Who’d’ve guessed? Anyway, starred review.

There are a lot of funny writers in the New Yorker, some of whom are just funny and some who are funny and, like, more. James Thurber was an early one (I haven’t read enough of his stories to know if any of the funny ones were more than funny). Back in the ’70s and ’80s, Donald Barthelme was absurdist, “postmodern” funny, and I laughed at his stories kind of the way an eight-year-old who’s the only kid at the table laughs along with the adults, and hopes someday he’ll get it. George Saunders has been huge and is one of my current favorites. I’ve never seen a writer who can be so vulgar and occasionally violent and maintain the comedy and wrap it up in enough generosity to make you weep and think maybe human beings aren’t all homicidal monsters, all evidence to the contrary. Another funny writer is Sam Lypsite—“Final Boy” (10/27/26). “Besides, what does Bennet know? He’s practically dead. Before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and . . .” so forth.

Another often funny writer is Nell Zinc, though “Welfare State” (12/29/25 & 1/5/26 combined issue) wasn’t funny. Well, it wasn’t a laugh riot, but it was really good. An American goes on a morning hike in … Bavaria? Switzerland? I couldn’t pin it down … with her German (Swiss?) friend, who is much more into it than the American. The American eventually finds out the friend doesn’t even like her. What a switcheroo!

You get the sad stories, too. Occasionally, they’re just mopey, and thank goodness these don’t show up often. There was one recently that seemed so particularly amateurish—as if it were turned in by an undergraduate quite sure his creative block was worth reading about—that I wondered whose mother he had to have known to get his story published in The New Yorker. Others could blow a hole in you. The best of these I’ve read recently was Yiyun Li’s “Calm Sea and Hard Faring” (3/9/26). A mother remembers, many years later, her son’s challenging time in elementary school, something all parents are familiar with. But the present day is a far bigger challenge. I can’t recommend this story highly enough, though you do have to be ready for the gut punch.

No Kings

In addition to reading short stories and laughing at cartoons from older issues of the magazine, I’m also coming across Talk of the Town commentary from Trump 1.0 that is quite depressing in its observation of events we know will someday be unimaginably worse. In the issue from November 6, 2017—exactly one year after Trump’s first election to the Presidency—Amy Davidson Sorkin, wrote a piece on Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s denunciation of Donald Trump as a danger to democracy. It was his—or he thought it was his—“Have-you-no-sense-of-decency-sir” moment, hoping it might finally call his party to its senses. It did not. The center-right just withered away, and we are left today with Democrats (for what they’re worth) on one side of the aisle, and a cult of personality on the other. And all the chaos and devastation that Personality promised us.

Before I started my little morning reading hobby, I’d been thinking of writing about messy democracy—why it’s inherently messy, why it’s good that it’s messy, and why its mess has worked so well in the world, generally, for the last two generations or so. But that’ll wait.

For now, it’s just important to make a stand for it, this Saturday in particular. No matter where you are, whether or not you walk in one of the thousands of No Kings marches that will be happening across the country, please do join in solidarity. It could be a t-shirt, a sign in your window, or just a comment in a check-out line. Just show up Saturday, one way or another. Marching would be best. Show the cult what they’re up against.

They’re Not Smart, There Are Just a Lot of Them

| Rob Ehle

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.

On Retirement, Not Going Insane, and Being a Novelist Wannabe

| Rob Ehle

It’s coming on four years now since I retired. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I also can’t believe how long it’s taken to settle in. Really, like almost four years, I think.

This is another attempt to write about anything at all not having to do with this country’s swift and final decline. But, in my responsibility to keep shining a light on that dark corner and never letting anyone feel comfortable about it, I’ll leave this link to a paper from the Cato Institute about the effects of immigration on the US economy. The long and the short of it is that Trump’s and Noeme’s ICE goons have been going door to door arbitrarily kidnapping people, including US citizens, of course, whose population has generated more in taxes than they received in benefits, and has created a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion, in real 2024 dollars. Basically, proving once again that immigration is very, very good for the country, and that even when there are issues that need to be addressed in how it works, being anti-immigrant is and always has been stupid and racist. Anyway . . .

Where was I? Settling in. The word I keep using is peripherality. On my Facebook profile and in other places that ask my profession, I say I’m tending my villa in exile. Lots of people—the lucky ones, at least, who can even afford to retire—soon find they just don’t have the stomach for it, and go back to work. At least in some capacity. If it has to be volunteering, so be it. I have stubbornly refused, sometimes at a mental cost, I think. Instead of surfing and writing, as I always said I’d be doing, I took up guitar and Portuguese. I’ve stuck to this regimen pretty faithfully. After three-plus years, my guitar playing is still unimpressive, but I’m reasonably good at Portuguese now. Very impressive to anyone who doesn’t speak Portuguese. I have some Portuguese-speaking friends, in Portugal and in Brazil, whom I chat with five or six times a month, and I’m struggling through my first Portuguese language novel.

People are always impressed, or at least happy to hear it, when I tell them these things, but the fact is that these are very much retired old man hobbies, and don’t much relieve that depressing feeling of being on the sidelines. It also doesn’t help that I’m not around people the way I was when I went to an office every day. Talking to language partners on WhatsApp really isn’t the same thing at all. I found a MeetUp group of Brazilians, whose company I’ve very much enjoyed when I’ve seen them, which was about three times in the last year. There’s a group of classical guitar afficionados I may eventually get together with, as long as I don’t have to prove I can play.

Occasionally, I’ve sat down to try to write. Something besides this blog. Eighteen years ago, I got the you’ve-won-the-lottery kind of news that I’d been given a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. That changed my life. At least for two years it did. For a little more, actually, since I got a number of short stories published and even got a residency at Macdowell, the fancy-wancy artists and writers retreat place in Vermont. I started writing a novel during the Stegner period, but it was very slow going. Out of a combination of indiscipline and methodical plodding—I really have to be “in the mood” to write, and once I’m doing it, I’m revising every sentence—it has usually taken a year and a half or two just to finish a short story. And to make sure success was as unlikely as possible, I wrote an “experimental” novel that took ten years, two agents, and finally, all the gumption out of me. I’ve still worked on short stories, but it is amazing, once one is finished, how long it can go before some magazine picks it up, if they ever do. With every polite rejection e-mail, you want to shoot back, Do you know who you are dealing with here, buster? Did you not see “Stegner Fellow” in the cover letter, you self-important little . , . but who is really being self-important there?

Anyway, in the end, it just got to be too much—to work so hard on something, knowing the long odds. As soon as you get stumped someplace, the voice comes in, No one’s going to publish this, anyway. Don’t you have something better to do? And this is where the Portuguese study, the guitar practice, came in. Because there were no stakes there, really. I was doing these things because I enjoyed them, not to prove myself. Actually, I proved myself anyway, at least with the language study. Got the little A2 certificate required of anyone applying for citizenship, which I won’t be doing any time soon, but still. Nice to have filed away.

Then something clicked a couple of months ago, and I started scribbling again. Not out of any great revelation. Just knowing I was good at it, better at it than I’d ever be at either Portuguese or guitar playing. And as long as the odds were that I’d get something published again someday, they were better than me performing guitar on stage. I mean, there’s still the old Lucy-holding-the-football thing, the idiocy of doing something over and over and hoping with all the evidence against you that something will change. But I did finish a story, finally. And I did send it out, and it did get rejected. But at least the reply was timely, within a couple of weeks instead of four months, and the editor said he’d like to see more. Sure, Lucy.

I also found a group of other deluded individuals, writers, with accolades of their own and many with just as much disappointment in their literary careers as mine. So I’m again seeing folks face to face. And doing something I’m good at. And it’s almost feeling like it did before retirement. Four years in.

And I’ve started another novel. Don’t hold your breath.

Revisionist History, Orange Shirts, Wokeness, Patriotism, and Nasty Girls

| Rob Ehle

This blog is stumbling along at about the pace I expected. Anyway, the country has gotten much worse since last September when I wrote that I was going to start “bearing witness,” and it recently culminated with the summary execution of a Minnesota woman by ICE thugs a few days ago, and the Trump administration’s unsurprising lies about “self-defense.”

Last October, I actually wrote a thing that I never put up here, I can’t remember why. It seems worth putting up now, though. It’s about the Right’s war on history, which they characterize as a war on “political history.” I thought as long as we’re mourning the assassination of US citizen Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathon Ross, before she’s forgotten forever by . . . non-political? history, I may as well finish what I started last fall, which I wrote when a Canadian friend told me about something called “Orange Shirt Day.”

Its official name is the National Day for Truth & Reconciliation, it’s celebrated (if that’s the word) every September 30, and it recalls Canada’s historical crimes against its First Nations. It’s been observed since 2013 and became a federal statutory holiday in 2021.

The specific history remembers the Canadian Indian residential school system, in which children were removed from their families to be raised in Christian schools and assimilated into White Society. Children’s clothes and other belongings were taken, they were dressed in uniforms, their hair was cut, and they weren’t allowed to speak their own languages. Needless to say, any practice of indigenous religion was also forbidden. Beatings were common. So was sexual abuse. Illness spread quickly in these schools—tuberculosis, especially—medical attention was often non-existent until much too late, and the mortality rate was much higher than in the national population.

Canada picked up this practice from, surprise! the US. Indian schools lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, though the last Indian school in Canada wasn’t shut down until 1997. The practice of wearing an orange shirt on Truth & Reconciliation Day comes from a story told by Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwepemc woman, who at age six had a brand new orange shirt taken from her and never returned when she was put in an Indian school. This didn’t happen in 1898 or 1915. Or in the 1930s, or in the 1950s. It happened in 1973. Phyllis Webstad is nine years younger than I am.

It’s ironic that last fall’s Orange Shirt Day came only five days after former Fox & Friends co-host and current US Secretary of, um, War? Pete Hegseth, declared that the Medals of Honor awarded to the soldiers who took part in the Wounded Knee massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people would not be rescinded, as the descendants of those executed had been demanding for years. There was a difference he said, between “being politically correct and being historically correct.” Which is sort of true and sort of not.

First of all, “correct” history isn’t a thing. Unless you’re talking about correct facts. Either hundreds of Lakota, including women and children, were killed at Wounded Knee, or they weren’t. That’s a fact, and it’s pretty verifiable. Whether it was correct to reward the men who killed them is not a fact. It’s a (very heated) discussion.

History isn’t a list of facts. There are always a million facts. But every history/story has only so much time and space, so we’re always making a judgment call about what’s important—what to leave out and what to leave in. You can’t tell a story about What Happened without making this decision. This is how history works and why historians argue all the time.

Here are some facts from American History:

  • Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas in 1492. He claimed to have discovered a “New World.”
  • In 1773, a group called The Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of tea from British Ships into Boston Harbor. They called it The Boston Tea Party.
  • On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Army launched a surprise attack on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii. The next day, the US declared war on Japan, joining the Second World War.

Here are some other facts from American History:

  • Slavery existed in the US from 1619 until 1865.
  • Indians have lived on reservations set aside for them by the US government since 1851.
  • The US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Pretty much all of these facts are common knowledge. People don’t argue about whether they’re true. They argue about which ones are the most important. Regarding the second three facts, I grew up hearing, more or less, that slavery was a regrettable era in the Southern US that ended with the Civil War; that reservations are . . . sad?; that the atomic bomb ended WWII and prevented greater loss of life than if the war had gone on.

Here are some facts from American History that I didn’t learn in school:

  • In 1921 in Tulsa, OK, a White mob burned down 35 blocks of a wealthy Black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses after a Black man was accused of assaulting a White woman. It was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history. (There’s that word again.)
  • California governor Leland Stanford oversaw a “War of Extermination” against Native Californians in the early 1860s. Between 1845 and 1880, the Native population in the state declined from around 150,000 to around 18,000.
  • After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt oversaw the mass internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans—about two thirds of whom were American citizens—into ten fenced camps.

These facts are all just as true and verified as the ones I learned in school. But they’re what I guess Pete Hegseth would call “political” history.

____________

Cut to a German movie called The Nasty Girl that I remember seeing way back. The ’90s? Maybe. It’s based on a true story of a high school girl who wrote an essay called “My Town During the Third Reich.” Which she expected to be a story of heroic resistance to the Nazi regime. Which, surprise! was not accurate. At all. It turned out (surprise!) that in the early years of the Reich, almost everyone in the town was complicit one way or another with the Nazis. All the Jews living in the town were expelled, and locals took their houses and property, just like in the rest of the country. Her town wasn’t an exception. Another inconvenient fact she uncovered was that there had been a number of concentration camps near the town, which (surprise!) everyone claimed to have no knowledge of.

Naturally, this girl’s essay did not receive local praise. It was a little too “woke.” There were rocks thrown through windows. There were death threats. There was a bomb, actually.

Ok, so . . . woke. “Woke” is called “Woke” because it’s about reading history anew, with one’s eyes opened a little wider. Looked at in a new light, noticing new things that actually happened but were somehow missed in the telling. There’s a reason I didn’t learn about the Tulsa massacre until I was in my 60s. I knew about the Trail of Tears a little earlier on, but it certainly wasn’t taught when I was in school. Nor was Roosevelt’s Japanese internment during World War II (Interestingly, the President who offered an official apology to Japanese-Americans for this colossal injustice was Ronald Reagan, that Woke old RINO.)

In the meantime, Florida passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which basically says any history that brings up past injustice in the US need not be taught, because it makes us White folks feel bad. This kind of thing happens in lots of countries when people don’t like to be reminded of things, when the history they’ve learned has to be adjusted. It’s very upsetting. Suddenly you don’t know who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Just who am I supposed to believe? But that’s the thing—an event either happened, or it didn’t. A woman was either shot in the head by ICE, or she wasn’t. US citizens have either been illegally detained and sent to foreign prisons or they haven’t been.

Do we remember them in fifty years? It all depends on who’s here to tell the story. It all depends on what we think, in 2076, is “historically correct.”

Bearing Witness

| Rob Ehle

I haven’t put a thing up on this blog since just after January 6, 2020. Partly because for a long time I thought we were finally moving on from the Great American Dumpster Fire of 2017–24 and I couldn’t think of anything else to ramble on about. But mainly because of a time-honored internet tradition of forgetting I have a blog.

Under Trump 1.0, I wrote a number of thingies here trying to get friends and family who didn’t seem to understand how horrible the situation was to understand why it really was. I was never sure it was doing any good. And when Trump, now a convicted felon, was re-elected in 2024—again, over a plainly sane, competent woman—I got my definitive answer.

But now, here I am again. I heard a story a while ago about some guy who during the Vietnam War allegedly stood outside the White House every night holding a candle in vigil, even in the rain. This may be an exaggeration. Still. The story goes a reporter once asked him whether he thought he could change the country this way, and his answer was, “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

So he was just bearing witness, which I’ve started thinking is at least something. So here’s me, bearing witness a little. I don’t expect it to make much a difference. I mean, I don’t see people like Heather Cox Richardson or Robert Reich or Jimmy Kimmel making much of one. And before you say, “Are you kidding? They’re making a huge difference,” name one MAGA friend or relative of yours whose mind any of those people have changed.

Mainly, I just want to have a record somewhere years from now, after the USA is a huge shell of its former self and we’re all scurrying about just trying to find bread for supper, that I wasn’t hiding away. That I occasionally yelled some truth.

I know there are all kinds of people who say it’s still important to “believe in America,” that the country can still rise above its current tribulation, once again live up to its ideals, etc. I believe this is just so much sad horse shit. I’ll be the happiest person in the world to be proven wrong, but this is what I believe:

The USA, aside from being founded on a continent that until recently had been completely unknown to Europeans, was born of the same mix of religious fervor and rapacious greed that had defined the old continent for millennia. There were a few well-intentioned idealists who tried to shape it into something new, but really this wasn’t much different from what the idealists in Europe were trying to do at the time—except that American idealists had slaves, on land stolen from inhabitants who’d lived there for tens of thousands of years. It’s arguable that the only thing “exceptional” about American history is the degree of its hypocrisy. Now, you can love a flawed country (especially since there’s no other kind) just like you can love a flawed family, and I think this is what people mean when they say they still love America even in its darkest days. But just like there comes a time a flawed family must face a reckoning, there comes a time a country (an empire, let’s be frank) sees its best days behind it.

And this is now true of the United States. I honestly don’t see a way out. We re-elected Donald Trump. This time with a popular majority. What’s the best possible outcome from this? A “Blue Wave” next year? Super. What’s the rest of the world going to do with this? Breathe a sigh of relief and take the US back on as an ally? Well, first of all, it’s still another two years of Trump. Secondly, we already elected him twice, so we can’t be counted on as a rational or emotionally stable population. From now on, the world’s going to be holding its breath every four years. We’re certainly never going to be “a City on a Hill” again. Speaking again of the example we set, places all over Europe (thirdly) are now electing their own extreme right leaders. Whatever world some hypothetically non-Trumpist U.S. President is going to be working with in early 2029, its remaining liberal democracies will not be taking any cues from us.

And a non-Trumpist in 2029 is by no means assured, of course. The only people whose minds were changed between 2020 and 2024 were the sliver who either decided to stay home or decided, after voting for Joe Biden, to vote for Donald Trump. This is not an encouraging trend. If real elections are even going to be a thing anymore.

So the only thing vaguely optimistic I can do right now is to bear witness. I welcome sunnier takes. Evidence-based ones, anyway. In the meantime, let’s each of us try to live honestly, do good work, and brush our teeth daily. Baby steps.

Such Reckless Hate

| Rob Ehle

This year—these last four, but especially this one—has felt to me more than once like Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, trudging through Mordor. I’ve always thought this was the longest, most desolate and, frankly, the most boring story line in the trilogy, and 2020 has had that same endless tedium punctuated by horror. In our nightly effort to stay up past 6:30, Geri and I sat down a few weeks ago and watched The Two Towers for maybe the fifteenth time. The middle film because, whatever, there are horses, and it’s not like we’re going to be confused about the plot anymore. Anyway, there’s a place not far from the end of the movie where it looks like the whole nation of Rohan is about to be exterminated by Saruman’s host. And the king turns to Aragorn and says, “So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?” He asks the question with such forlorn bafflement, it’s always been one of my favorite scenes. He’s an old soldier used to war, no illusions about a world untouched by strife. But suddenly it’s as if a curtain is pulled back to reveal some utter hopelessness to him, some bedrock of fundamental despair: this is the one basic truth of the world. It’s fantasy, of course, so it turns out it’s just before dawn, when Rohan gets saved by a wizard and a couple dozen knights on horseback. I say this smirkingly, but I won’t deny that there are times in my own life I have been too hasty to give up, and the cavalry has arrived just in time.

*

I wrote that paragraph maybe ten days ago. I couldn’t figure out what more I was going to say, specifically. And then yesterday happened. Between that paragraph and this one, the Capitol was stormed by thousands of men and women in camo and bandoliers, assault rifles and supersized flags—Trump flags, American flags, and of course Confederate flags. The entire Congress was taken to a safe place to shelter in place as a mob ransacked the House floor. Men sacked Nancy Pelosi’s office and posed for pictures, climbed up the walls of the Capitol Building like a scene right out of . . . well, The Two Towers. A woman was shot and killed. There were too many stabbings to count. It took local police and the National Guard four hours, five?, to finally take back the building.

To take back the building.

I’m writing like it was an attempted coup. Which it was. We are suddenly Chile or Cambodia.

Reckless hate.

Who is surprised that this happened? Everyone’s horrified at Trump, who started the whole thing with another nut job rant outside the Capitol to tens of thousands of disciples he invited into town and whose only message to them once the siege began was to say, “I love you,” “This election was stolen,” “I understand your pain,” and “Be peaceful.” Because he is Donald Trump. But I keep saying: Trump isn’t who should horrify us. He’s just the rusty old muscle car with bad brakes and a 450-horsepower engine that Republicans thought they could take on a joy ride. What the hell else was going to happen, making him the 2016 nominee?

It’s us who should horrify us.

*

So I’m writing this, conservative friend, to get to the bottom of what all your hate is about. Or, if you object to that word, your fear. Your very fundamental concern. (But really your hate.) Beyond the slogans and the righteous wrath. Now let’s agree on this straight off: I know you wouldn’t storm the Capitol. I know you disapprove of what happened. In the strongest possible terms. But I suspect also that this attempt, which has actually happened now, at keeping illegitimate power by a sitting President, has unsettled you; but it has probably not changed your politics in a basic way. It’s certainly shaken you up. But you’ll still be voting Republican in two years. And that’s not necessarily, at least not usually, anything to object to. But this is what I suspect: you are also thinking—I think you are thinking, correct me if I’m wrong—“I do not condone what happened. I have always opposed violent protest. But . . .” (Correct me if I’m off-base here, because I would dearly love to be.) “. . . but given the irregularities . . .” (Seriously, shut me up right now.) “. . . given the all the questions . . .” (And you pause for me to get it, to agree you have a point.) “I can see why this could happen. I mean. Can’t you?”

And by this, you do not mean—as I would, agreeing with you—that you can see how a thug has the power to whip up a mob.

By this, you mean that, much as you are horrified by what has transpired, much as you hope the yahoos who actually did the damage should be punished to the fullest extent of the law . . .

That it was basically a matter of the right cause by the wrong means.

You would not shout, “Stop the Steal.” But you are troubled by the “irregularities” in the 2020 election. It’s very troubling to you. And in your sober reflections, you might be remembering words you heard last summer from a lot of liberals. Because when Portland and Minneapolis burned, weren’t liberals saying, “What did you expect”? Liberals were saying they absolutely didn’t condone the looting and the destruction of property. But they found it perfectly logical that a video of a policeman kneeling on a Black man’s neck and killing him might incite isolated acts of violence. Catharthis.

And you’re wondering how what you’re saying is somehow not allowed when it’s allowed for liberals to say it.

*

So this, conservative friend, is why you can say it, because you can say anything you want in America, but why you are wrong:

Because what happened yesterday did not stand for anything.

It is why your comparison is absolutely, insidiously wrong. What happened yesterday was just pure, unbridled, reckless hate. Hate was the only thing that united those people. There was nothing else they had in common and no Idea they believed in. They are people whose wives and daughters and mothers have had abortions. They are people with gay brothers and sisters who come home for Thanksgiving. A few have husbands and wives who aren’t White. They have parents and grandparents who weren’t born in this country. They take Social Security checks. There are as many of them as there of the rest of us who are confused about their sexuality, or who have confused their families by it. They have lost as many loved ones to the pandemic as the rest of us, maybe more. They’re as much a motley as the rest of America. So what brought them all together? What was their George Floyd moment?

Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, and his ill treatment.

Black men have been beaten all over America. And now Donald Trump has been beaten. No one ever laid a finger on him, but he’s been beaten. He just lost a fair election by a wide margin. There was no conspiracy. There was no tampering. There is no Deep State. Donald Trump was just beaten in a regular old election.

Another way of saying this is that there is no George Floyd. For these people. There is only hate.

For Democrats. For cities. For problems that can’t be solved by just yelling. For non-Whites. For difference. For being asked to wear a mask in a pandemic. For being told you can’t have your guns. For being asked to live with people who are not like you. Or at least admit they exist. Yesterday was one big, fireball of hate. There was no other fuel in it.

And I agree with you. Given what’s happened in this country, what else would I expect?

What any Republican or conservative has to ask himself or herself today, is what they stand for. Not what they’re against. They have to ask themselves when was the last time they listened to someone they disagreed with. When was the last time they changed their mind. And what the way forward must be for a country that doesn’t look like the country they were born into—not because it’s decaying, or immoral, or less than it once was—but because countries change. Just like people. You know what doesn’t change? A stone. The moon. Death.

This is the dilemma a conservative has today. How do you deal with a living, breathing country, one that will never again be the one you were born into, just as it isn’t the country Abraham Lincoln was born into. It’s better, it’s worse . . . it’s different. And that isn’t a bad thing. Unless you prefer to live on the moon.

Miscellaneous reactions to what just happened.

| Rob Ehle

70 million people voted for Donald Trump

Which he keeps tweeting, as if it’s proof that he should get to stay President. Which, somebody pointed out, is like saying the 49ers should have won the Super Bowl because they scored 20 points, even though Kansas City scored 31. The fact that 70 million Americans wanted to give him a second term, though, is not insignificant. In fact, it’s terrifying.

Elections have certainly been rigged in the past

In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million votes. He conceded on December 13, after losing Florida by about a thousand votes, and so giving up the electoral college votes he needed in addition to the simple majority of Americans’ wishes.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million. She conceded on election night after losing the electoral college.

Things I can deal with again

The news.

The American flag.

Scary women

As far as I can make out, Kamala Harris is a scary woman because . . .

She is a woman.

She’s black.

Her parents weren’t born in America.

Yes, we get it. Trump isn’t going away.

He could die tonight (biting my tongue here), and he still wouldn’t go away. Because he gaslighted us. From now on, you can’t defend yourself with facts. Only with the right endorsements. From now on, if you say the earth is round, you can’t show a picture from space to prove it. You have to show a picture from space published by Fox News.

I don’t know when people with different opinions will be able to have a discussion again in this country by starting with a few undisputed facts, but I don’t expect it in my lifetime.

This is all thanks to Donald.

Alex Trebec is dead.

So he’s out, as an arbiter. We’re just left with Family Feud, I guess.

I like Joe, even though he was awfully low on my list.

When he announced his candidacy, I said it was like when someone my age bounds up to the volleyball net at the staff picnic and everyone looks around awkwardly trying to decide which team has to take me.

In retrospect, I do wonder if Elizabeth Warren would have won, though. Maybe. But you have to admit. She’s a woman, and that’s pretty scary for a lot of people.

If things are bad enough, a few Republicans might vote for a Democrat. If he’s white, if he isn’t a woman.

Conversely, people are perfectly ok with a woman Supreme Court justice, or a black one. In fact, they’re very proud to be ok with it. It’s just that really volatile mix of gender or race with Democratic politics. Like, whoa . . . yeah, sure she was a DA but . . . black woman Dem? The only way you trust a woman of color is if she’s a Republican. Only way to prove she’s got her head screwed on right. Otherwise . . . scary!

Science, glad to have you back.

Wouldn’t it be great to get Republicans back on board with empirical evidence? Maybe we can shame them into it.

Evangelicals, you’re going to have a President who’s a regular churchgoer!

Catholic, I know. You can’t have everything. But you’re good with the Catholic lady for the Supreme Court, so I figure this could be a win, too.

As William Ader (@JustBill) tweeted the other day, “Lots of evangelicals surprised today to find out what ‘God’s will’ really is.”

Why We Need a Loyal Opposition

| Rob Ehle

(In which I try to convince you Christians that a Democratic Congress would not be the worst thing for America)

Two years ago, conservatives began a grand experiment: electing a morally repugnant man in order to further a moral aim. To save unborn babies, evangelicals and many other conservatives voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump has now given them their second Supreme Court judge, a man of dubious moral character himself, and the hope is now kindled that someday soon, abortion will be illegal again.

That abortion itself won’t ever become a thing of the past, or even become less common, doesn’t seem to have been factored in much. That more women will just be permanently injured or will die having unsafe abortions is either ignored, or it’s part of some kind of ethical calculus in which the extinction of Planned Parenthood is worth various other less savory results of a strong-man leader with both congress and the courts in his pocket. It’s worth thousands of (already born) children being ripped away from their parents and kept in cages (because their parents were doing more or less the same thing our great great grandparents did). It’s worth reporters being called the enemy of the people, and the assault of journalists being encouraged by the President of the United States. It’s worth the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, being ridiculed by the President days after a hurricane that left thousands homeless and three thousand dead. It is worth women who’ve been sexually assaulted being mocked (by the President, it goes without saying). It’s worth despots being praised, and democratic leaders and 60-year-old alliances abandoned. It’s worth white nationalist rallies, it’s worth Democratic leaders and liberals being mailed pipe bombs, and it’s worth massacres at synagogues. It’s worth a President responding that “there is blame on both sides,” and Anne Coulter and other conservatives theorizing about a liberal hoax.

I guess to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. I just didn’t expect conservatives, and Christians especially, to be ok with quite so many eggs. Increasingly, it turns out, traditional conservatives are not ok with it. George Will, a conservative columnist I have rarely agreed with on anything, has called for both houses of congress to be taken over by the Democrats. So has Max Boot, another conservative, who says the Republican party is now “a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe.” Trump has set the tone, the Republican House and Senate have followed along like sheep, and with the darkest demons of our natures loosed, now all over the country conservative newspapers are endorsing Democratic congressional candidates. The Arizona Republic has endorsed Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat, not because she’s liberal (she isn’t) but because she is the most likely candidate to be bipartisan. The Des Moines Register has backed a Democrat because the only alternative is an eight-term incumbent who’s shown himself to be an unrepentant racist and (luckily) a completely ineffective congressperson. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle—all conservative papers traditionally backing Republican candidates—have abandoned Ted Cruz and called for the election of Beto O’Rourke as the only politician who “seems interested in making deals or finding middle ground.”

There have been other periods in our history when one party’s had all the power, and it always drives the party out of power crazy, but I don’t know of another time when it was so horrible and hopeless. The Republicans who’d publicly despised Trump when he was a crackpot in the primaries, then who promised once he got the nomination to keep him in check if he became the President, have pretty much all bowed before him since he was elected. The only ones who take him to task are those who are retiring and don’t have to worry about being voted out of their jobs. There has never been a time it was more important to balance a government with a loyal opposition. Trump and the Republicans do not treat Democrats as if we are fellow citizens, but like we’re a foreign enemy. This is why it was so important to them to deny Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee even a hearing, let alone a vote on the Senate floor. It justified gerrymandered voting districts, and in the Democratic districts left over, suppressing the vote altogether. No holds barred, because it’s an existential, good vs. evil battle.

Which is, pardon me, fucked up. Sorry. Effed up.

I first learned the term “loyal opposition” in high school in Canada, with its parliamentary government, and no executive branch. This is the name for the party out of power, and they are so called because it’s important to remember that we may all be of different opinions and have differing ideas on what is best for the country, but we’re all on the same team. We are united in our love for our country and our fellow citizens. As soon as basic loyalty is questioned, we’ve taken a dark turn. The Republican Party and Donald Trump together have taken this turn. That’s why it’s so important that there are people in control of congress who really will keep Trump in some kind of check. Who will, among other things, hold him to account for his lies. Without them, Republicans will continue to only wag their fingers and shrug at his increasingly plutocratic and white nationalist agenda (what else do you call the abolition of birthright citizenship and suppression of the African American vote?) I don’t know how long it will take evangelicals especially to realize that the Republican party is not God’s ordained army. That concern for the health of the planet isn’t a secularist plot and that poverty and illiteracy and a huge gap between rich and poor are the signs not of a great nation but a dying one. There seems to be a remnant. Maybe there’s a little hope. A smidgen.

I’ve gone on long enough. I’d wanted to get this out a week ago. Go vote. Do the right thing. Join the smidgen.

Pedophiles and moral calculus

| Rob Ehle

Last night, Alabama did something I assumed was impossible, and turned their backs on an accused serial child molester. It’s a statement about where our country is at the moment that this was a surprise. There are three lessons I learn from this:

  • Republican cynicism isn’t infinite. While a solid majority of white Alabamians voted for Roy Moore (who in addition to his loathsome treatment of young girls, also said in September that the last time America had been great was “at a time when families were united, even though we had slavery”), just enough of them were sufficiently disgusted that they either stayed home or wrote in an alternate candidate. One or two even voted for the Democrat, Doug Jones.
  • White evangelicals are an aging and dwindling minority. They’re usually more motivated to get to the polls, but in basic numbers, there are more young people and African Americans and other people of color in the country, and once these people are motivated themselves, they will always win in a fair race.
  • Speaking of fair races, we learned last night that even without the safeguards of the Voting Rights Act, there’s only so much work voter suppression can do for Republicans. Whether it’s limiting the number of voting places in Democratic neighborhoods, placing regular voters on “inactive” lists, or any number of other tactics to stack the deck against Democrats, if there’s enough outrage, people will get their votes into the ballot boxes.

That Roy Moore was even on the ballot is a testimony to the terminal rot in the Republican party. I’ve read two prominent conservatives over the last week who have declared themselves politically homeless. (David Brooks, wistful for Reaganomics, says “The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.” Peter Wehner, who served under Reagan and both Bushes, just wrote a piece outlining why he could no longer call himself an evangelical Republican.)

It’s important to note that Donald Trump is no longer an aberration within the GOP. When the Republican National Committee decided to get behind Moore after the revelations that he was groping 14-year-old girls, they were basically saying that ethical behavior no longer had anything to do with the party’s ideals and goals. They’ll take all comers in order to hold their majority. Remember . . . this wasn’t the state organization. This was the national organization. No Republican can any longer say their party just has some bad apples. When the party accommodates repulsive characters like this, the party becomes the bad apple.

Evangelicals can no longer afford to think in terms of litmus tests. They have to start using their grown-up brains. If you go into the voting booth thinking abortion is different from every other issue and you must make certain compromises to hold that line, you are being majorly conned. And you’re in danger of betraying everything you think you stand for, including the sanctity of life.

You folks, you white evangelical folks, will not have the power in 30 years that you have today. You won’t have it in three years. You need to decide how you’re going to negotiate that. You need to start preparing your epitaph. Religious movements wax and wane, and whatever God has in store for the world, it’s not going to look like what you’re used to, because it never does. What I’m saying is, if you want the Lord to bless your country and its future, you’re just going to have to do a much better job than you have over the last year of using the plain common sense He gave you.