4 years later

In 2016 right after Trump was elected I took to my bed in the style of an English aristocrat about whom Trollope or some other mid-to-late 19c writer might write, “he took to his bed”, for 2 or 3 days, rising only for necessities, stung that I’d gotten it so wrong. That I was depressed seems too psychological—‘depression’ is a word that belongs to the age of Freud (and Louise Gluck): if there was one thing I was it was this: I was disappointed, in mourning for myself and my fellow citizens, and at least part of the disappointment was in not having a clinical explanation as to what had befallen me.

For days, I couldn’t think, I made no notes, I did not want to read—all my usual comforts and coping methodoligies had been stripped of their past productive lives. The best I could do, once I’d rallied enough to get up out of bed and resume my usual life, was to scribble in a notebook I keep by my bed, “how quickly we’re building a world where only a particular kind of person can survive…”

4 years later I still don’t know how it happened. I keep looking for hotspots of intelligence in this country; every so often one or two pops up, flickers, then disappears.

Perhaps we are finally getting somewhere with Democracy, and it’s healthy to believe that the Trump experience has propelled us there, so that we should be grateful for his leadership: that a Citizen, dismayed with his political choices/options, must now only vote for Himself or Herself and let the collective fall where they may. If we’re crazy enough to believe in Jesus and to shape public policy around that belief, then why not conspiracy theories?