Preserving Our Sanity, During Insane Times.
This post is about some articles, essays, and other items I’ve seen recently that all bear on the same issue. That is how to maintain sanity, effectiveness, and the simple ability to function. And to do so even as each hour’s news contains some fresh outrage that, in other eras, would by itself represent a months-long, administration-defining major scandal.
Consider just one comparison of the change in standards, among hundreds of possibilities. That is Loretta Lynch, versus Pam Bondi.
The Lynch story, from nine years ago: In 2016, Loretta Lynch was US attorney general, under Barack Obama. Bill Clinton was a former president, out of office for 15 years, whose wife was running for the White House, against Donald Trump. On a broiling summer day that year, planes carrying them—private plane for Clinton, government plane for Lynch—were parked near each other on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport. Clinton went over to Lynch’s plane to say hello.
Lynch, as she would come to regret, invited him to climb up the stairs and see her plane. “Look it’s 100 degrees out there, come up and we’ll talk about our grandkids,” she said, according to aides’ later testimony. Their onboard chat went on for about 20 minutes, with Clinton naturally doing most of the talking. Lynch’s staff members started tapping their watches and sending eye signals to Lynch, and finally telling her, “Look, ma’am, we have to go.” The Lynch team eased Clinton out of the plane.
But by that evening, Lynch was telling her staffers that what she’d meant as a hospitable gesture—telling a 70-year-old former president to come in out of the heat—was an “incredible mistake in judgment.” That was because it could create even the appearance of partisan involvement by the DOJ.1 Within days she had effectively recused herself from involvement in the ongoing “but her emails!” investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server, with ripple effects that are with us even now.
By contrast we have, of course, the Bondi story, from last week: Out in public, a sitting president directs his attorney general to bring charges against a former FBI director who has become a political critic. Also right out in public, from the White House, that president calls the suspect, James Comey, “guilty as hell” and “a very bad guy.”
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, riffles through federal prosecutors until she finds one, newly named and with exactly zero relevant experience, who will do what the president wants. Of the 53 Republicans in the Senate, many of whom had denounced Loretta Lynch for her “impropriety” in 2016 , exactly zero offered a word of complaint about converting the Department of Justice into a tool of personal vengeance. At many news sites, this was just one more entry in the “Trump breaking norms” category. (For another comparison, involving scales-of-justice, Richard Nixon, and Charles Manson, see the notes below.2)
We’ve absorbed that blow, and countless others. More will come tomorrow. When, among other things, the federal government may shut down. What do we do?
1) Andrea Pitzer, ‘Mind the Gap.’
Andrea Pitzer is a book and magazine writer, whose online site is called Degenerate Art. Last week she published an essay that I found useful in managing the mental and practical burden of these times.
Pitzer doesn’t pretend to answer fully “what is to be done”? But she examines and engages all aspects of “how do we live, now?” in a way I think will resonate with others. Or at least it did with me. The “gap” she refers to is the distance between analyzing what is going on, and finding something to do about it.
Here’s a link to her essay. And here’s a representative passage.
The danger for the left now is to get caught up in critiques of those who are actually doing things, in which the people doing the critiquing will mistake their contribution for something useful.
At this stage, facing a closing window for outcomes without significant increase in state violence, putting your weight into the societal shift we need is far more valuable.
Much of that will take the form of small actions in your community. And that shift might be easier than you imagine.
Perhaps you’ll not be surprised to hear that she ends up with an exhortation to do something, right now, at the local level. (For instance, at food banks—as grocery prices soar, and federal aid is cut off.) I found it heartening to read someone who doesn’t have all the answers but is wrestling with the same questions I do.
2) ‘Citizen Historians,’ at the Smithsonian.
Here is another example of people taking local actions of potentially major national significance.
Last week the PBS NewsHour program had a segment on DC-area citizen volunteers who had quietly, effectively, launched a crowdsourced program to document the holdings and presentations at the Smithsonian, before those displays are memory-holed away. The story, by NewsHour veteran Jeffrey Brown, is here. A previous report on NPR by Elizabeth Blair is here.
The project was developed by Chandra Manning and James Millward, both history professors at Georgetown University in DC. Millward is best known for his works on China. He told Blair of NPR that he saw a parallel between Chinese-style “whitewashing of history”—during the Cultural Revolution, after dark episodes like the ‘Great Leap Forward’ nationwide famine of the 1950s and the post-Tiananmen crackdowns of the late 1980s—and what the Trump team was trying to do with historical awareness in the US.
In China, measures to erase and rewrite history have been amazingly effective. When we were living there, twenty years after Tiananmen, we rarely encountered high school or college students who had even heard of the protests and violence there. “It really upset me to see [Chinese-style erasure] being threatened in the United States as well,” Millward told NPR. So he, Manning, and their colleagues are doing something about it. It’s awful that the US needs this intervention. But it’s important that people are showing ways to respond.
In your own community, are there local history displays, local institutions, local monuments, local leaders whose significance and message need to be recorded now? Follow the Georgetown/DC/Smithsonian example. Do it. It’s a local example that can be applied elsewhere, in troubling times.
3) The ‘Jimmy Kimmel’ lesson: MAGA is dangerous. But it is also weak, not strong.
Two weeks ago, no one thought that Jimmy Kimmel would give his name to an episode of cultural and political history. But he has, and I direct your attention to the lesson Greg Sargent of The New Republic has drawn, in this article.
It is not simply “TACO.” This is the meme that the bully Trump always chickens out when facing resistance, and demands more and more when he detects weakness.3 It is rather that ongoing evidence points in the opposite direction from Trump’s chosen “landslide victory” narrative: That most people don’t agree with what he’s doing, that most Americans don’t like the ICE terror raids, that most employers and employees don’t like the big, beautiful tariffs, and that Trump opponents should therefore act as if they are speaking for the “real” country. As happened in the Kimmel case.
A sample from Sargent’s article, which starts with the gun murder of Charlie Kirk:
Here’s the bottom line: While Kirk’s death was an appalling tragedy and he was unquestionably beloved by millions, the Trumpist right has baited the media into inflating Kirk’s cultural and societal importance far beyond that, into deifying him as akin to a world-historical martyr—and into exaggerating the hold that Trumpism has on the culture writ large.
The reality MAGA will not acknowledge is this: Trump’s authoritarian tactics in suppression of disfavored speech are themselves triggering a massive cultural outcry. And by all indications, it’s larger than the one driving the push to censor imperfect speech about Kirk.
Trump-MAGA have basically been bluffing: Their overbearing threats and bluster are meant to snooker us into believing that the culture is lost, that Trump’s grip on it is unshakable, that mobilization is futile. For now, this episode has demonstrated precisely the opposite, and we shouldn’t let ourselves forget it.
Trump is for the moment powerful, thanks to the spineless Congressional GOP and the corrupt (Thomas, Alito) and complaisant (Roberts et al) GOP Supreme Court. But he is not popular—not his persona, not his policies, not what he is trying to do. (His approval ratings are historically low.) We’re in a race right now, between the American majority’s efforts to show the leverage of its opposition to Trump, and the MAGA minority’s efforts to block all means of accountability. (Through gerrymandering efforts; attacks on the press; attacks on the judiciary; attacks on universities and NGOs; and so on.)
Sargent’s message, and Kimmel’s: There are more of us, than of them. That doesn’t stop what RFK Jr. is doing to public health, or Pete Hegseth to the military. But it’s crucial to bear in mind.
4) Two lessons on the ‘Real America,’ as revealed by Charlie Kirk.
This weekend, the NYT in print and online had two powerful pieces on the legacy of Charlie Kirk, and what tributes to him revealed. The comments I have in mind are from Ta-Nehisi Coates (disclosure: a one-time colleague and long-time friend), in a conversation with the NYT’s Ezra Klein; and by Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a NYT opinion piece.
Both of these writers are Black, and framed their reactions to Kirk from that perspective. I want to explain why I, as a Boomer-era white male, found those perspectives clarifying and valuable.