We are following the news to see how Donald Trump fares as he attempts, by hook or by crook, to win the Electoral College vote on December 14.
I have no idea who will be inaugurated as POTUS on January 20. I do know that if it’s Donald Trump, he or his backers will have depended on the complicity of the Senate and Federal Judiciary. His second four years will rest on legal technicalities, never-before-used constitutional provisions, and the historical precedent (the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876) that brought this country Jim Crow, lynch mobs, the Tulsa Massacre, decades of virtual slavery, and the reconstitution, as a nation-within-a-nation, of the Confederate States of America. It’s easy to imagine that a second Trump term will result in recognizably similar outcomes.
Here’s something else I imagine: a second term will destroy Donald Trump. He is, as his every television appearance reminds us, a poorly aging mound of flesh, well along in a relentless process of corporal and cognitive decay. Big, angry, obese men don’t get discounts on their life insurance policies. Sometime in the near future, Donald Trump, through a combination of rage, age, and what looks like frontotemporal dementia, will be reduced to either a corpse or a nursing home resident.
That his nursing home might be the White House is not without historical precedent—Woodrow Wilson had a severe stroke in early October of 1919, and spent the remaining seventeen months of his presidency unable to talk or walk, his condition kept secret by his wife, Edith, who acted as his proxy. One wonders how Melania would do.
The end of Trump will not mean the end of his policies. He’s created a momentum toward cruelty that’s not going to go away. Too many people have discovered the pleasure of humiliating their enemies. Far too many people have been taught to blame their poverty or misery or lack of education on people of different races or tribes.
Trump has accomplished a lot of division during his time as our leader, and it’s impossible to think that he did it all by himself. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’m not sure if he’s in control of the forces that back him or if they’re in control of him.
Something There Is That Doesn’t Love A Wall, Robert Frost once wrote. If he were alive today, Frost would be writing Something There Is That Doesn’t Want These States United.
If there are indeed behind-the-scenes disintegrative entities powerful enough to swing the election for Trump, they’ll be powerful enough to put down the meat ax and pick up the scalpel. If the Electoral College anoints Donald Trump, it will do so with the knowledge that it’s anointing President Mike Pence.
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As long as I’m playing the prophet, let me say that the vaccines available by Inauguration Day will begin to diminish the pandemic and restart the economy, although for the poor and unemployed, it will be too late. The economic forces in play before the pandemic—financialization, inequity in wealth, automation, the increase in jobs with no apparent usefulness, misallocation of resources for housing and infrastructure—have all been strengthened by the past six months, and they won’t go away because we all get vaccinated. Unfortunately for the people alive a generation from now, the pandemic distracted us from problems they will be facing. Instead, it let us concentrate our energies on ways to save the wealth, health, and comfort of Baby Boomers.
As a Boomer, I can appreciate that, but I also know that when a civilization doesn’t put the welfare of its young people first, it dies sooner rather than later.
As a Boomer, I’m in one of the COVID-vulnerable groups, which means I’ll probably get vaccinated before a bunch of other people. Young people can usually survive COVID without serious lasting effects, which is wonderful, but they cannot experience climate change without serious lasting effects. They cannot thrive in an industrial economy—because there won’t be an industrial economy—when the amount of energy it takes to get a barrel of oil out of the ground and refined into its various products approaches the amount of energy in that barrel. They are already experiencing a financial system that rewards the few and impoverishes the many, and poverty has killed far more of them than the coronavirus has killed of their elders.
The vaccines are evidence that our civilization can throw money, intelligence, and accumulated knowledge at a disease, and within a short time make it go away. It sounds like a no-brainer, but we need to identify the more virulent diseases—economic, cultural, climatic—where young people are the vulnerable group, and we need to work just as hard for cures. The effort will require empathy, sacrifice, and good will. These qualities seem to have disappeared among the people who have the wealth and power in this country.
Our oligarchs suffer from a different kind of poverty, but it’s just as lethal as the financial kind. We need a vaccine for it, and at-risk volunteers to test it on.
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I’ll admit that I’m worried by the prospect of an mRNA concoction rewiring the genetic material in my cells. That’s what viruses do anyway, all the time, but still, it’s a huge moment of trust in science and the good will of pharmaceutical companies when that needle slides into your arm. Every one of the many vaccines in development is years away from being declared fully safe, which makes me worry even more.
Still, Julie and I will get the vaccine when we can. At some point, trusting a civilization that has spent the last century lengthening the lives of its citizens seems reasonable, especially if you’re like most people and are still alive because of it. It will be the end of the pandemic for us, one way or another.
I hope that shortly after my vaccination, Julie can get vaccinated as well and two weeks later, still kicking, we can finally go on a book tour for my end-of-the-world book. Our universe will expand considerably the minute we get in the car and head for motels, bookstores, and real sit-down restaurants while they still exist.
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If I keep away from the news, our winter of discontent turns into mere winter. A great white calm has descended upon Sawtooth Valley. A car or pickup goes by on Highway 75 every five or ten minutes, but the plows have been working, and snowbanks muffle the sounds of its passing. If I listen closely, I can hear the sounds of the woodstove fan and the hum of the refrigerator, but that’s only when we’re not listening to NPR or a podcast or music. During last week’s storm, we had a couple of short power outages, and we realized how routinely noisy our household is, even in the quiet months.
For the past three afternoons we’ve been out skiing. The sky has been dark blue, clear and cold, and we’ve put tracks in new powder on a hard base. We had watched, with dismay, when a rainy day melted a foot and a half of powder down to four inches of slush, but then it got cold again. The slush froze to a hard, stable base layer that will be with us until April. Then it snowed another six inches.
A skiff of snow is in the forecast for today. I’d prefer something in excess of a foot. I don’t care if I end up shoveling roofs this winter. I’m hoping for a giant snow year. I’m hoping for two weeks of fresh powder every morning, and then another two weeks of the same.
What’s on the ground is fast, easy-turning snow, but we’ve taken it slow. It’s easy to get tripped up, skiing in November—a half-inch of frost on a high rock can ruin your day, and a ski under a downed log can ruin your winter. Reports from Galena and Banner Summits indicate that people are out there on their rock skis, pushing the season, but we’ll wait until it snows another foot before venturing onto the steeper slopes.
It has been a thrill just to glide along in shallow snow, slaloming between sagebrush when we get going fast enough.
I had forgotten that I had sharpened and hot-waxed our skis last spring before putting them away for the summer. It was evidence that the past and some of the people in it are more generous and forward-thinking than I normally give them credit for.
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It may be our informal quarantine, it may be the season, it may be the time of life, but lately I seem to have signed up for an elementary school memory-of-the-day. It’s similar to the word-of-the-day you can get in your morning’s email, except it appears in your mind’s eye instead of on your computer screen. I have spent long moments thinking of things I haven’t thought of for sixty-odd years.
Once it was the face of a classmate, who inspired me to say to my parents, after my first week of first grade, that I had finally found a girlfriend. Once it was a leather ski boot attached to a wooden ski with a beartrap binding, sliding personless toward the rope-tow lift-line during afternoon ski lessons. Once it was our principal telling our fifth-grade class that the fourth-grade teacher had killed herself and we should be nice to the fourth graders that day. More than once it was our crazed third-grade teacher beating hell out of some little kid for singing the wrong verse in the right song, something third-graders really can’t help doing. Once it was our principal coming into class to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot, and that we should call our parents and go home if we could. Once it was simply an image of our principal with tears on his face, not because anyone had been murdered, but because he had helped move a giant freestanding coat closet in the school hallway, and where it had stood he had found twenty dollars or so in loose quarters, and had realized that over the years, bunches of little kids had lost their lunch money to the cracks in the closet’s floor.
These memories are as real as yesterday’s skiing through the sagebrush, with Juno running beside me, growling and barking as gravity started to widen the distance between us. They’re considerably more real than starving children, contested elections, power-mad oligarchs, demented rulers, venal senators, and a civilization not expected to outlast the decade.
That makes me sound heartless, and maybe I am. Certainly I’m heartless compared to my grade-school principal. Almost everyone is.
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It’s a bit frightening to have the past emerge bearing far more substance than the present. It may be that Donald Trump’s troubled relationship with the truth has sucked the substance out of his days and ours, but at this point it’s hard to see his story as anything but that of a ghost with no past at all.
It may be that when a country starts living a lie, sacred ceremony becomes empty ritual, laws become the clever tools of interest groups, history becomes a murderous fiction, and everyone you see on a television screen has been told what to say. As George Orwell discerned, memory has no place in a world where political power dictates the truth. Maybe what I’m experiencing is memory fighting back, demanding its due, presenting incontrovertible images instead of questionable narratives.
One thing’s for certain: everyone, even Donald Trump, reaches a point in life where memories are all that’s left, and if there are no memories, nothing’s left. The same truth applies to countries, and it’s being applied to this country as it selects a new president. We would do well, for the sake of the kids, to remember what’s happened over the last five centuries on this continent, especially when we make decisions that will affect the next five centuries. It’s a way of getting back some of the reality that has been taken from us.