You learn all kinds of new stuff when you have a front-row seat to creeping authoritarianism.
I now know, for example, that what I’d long taken for a natural law – that you cannot get sacked from a federal government job, of which there were once many around here – is as unnatural as hell. I know lots of folk who either retired rather than be shoved into paper-pushing corners, got DOGEd or are hanging on in agencies that have either been almost fully emptied and/or populated with politicos whose prime directive is to destroy everything they can reach.
I also now know that it’s illegal to drive a commercial vehicle on National Park Service land. I read about park police setting up checkpoints and pulling over commercial vehicles and shortly thereafter – shock and alarm! – ICE agents would arrive to check the status of the predominantly Hispanic occupants of such commercial vehicles.
The legality of such checkpoints is decidedly murky, but that’s how things are in the good old US of A these days: murky AF. The new stuff one learns is distressing at best, and everything you thought you knew has gone ultra-squidgy.
Until Trump 2.0, Americans took for granted that, within extremely wide, ever-expanding but definable parameters, we kind of knew what was likely to happen. Now all bets are off, though even that’s backwards as, thanks to our ass-hatted Supreme Court, pretty much anyone can bet on pretty much anything.
I went to a late-season baseball game earlier this month, my first of the year, and just outside the stadium gates, at the end of a block of restaurants and bars filled with pre-gamers, was a circle of National Guard soldiers, just standing there, chatting and holding their rifles. As an old white guy, I’m not who they’re looking to threaten, if indeed they’re looking to threaten anyone, but they managed to anyway.
I’m old enough to associate the National Guard with dead students at Kent State (1970) and DC in flames after Martin Luther King was killed (1968), so their presence made me feel a lot of things, but safer wasn’t one of them. And I walked into the ball park feeling as if I had just started one of those novels or movies that from the jump are hard to see ending any way but badly.
The rationale for the troops – that Washington was a lawless war zone where no one ever went outside and tourists spent time in shooting galleries rather than museums – is nonsense, but the Truth Mattering Era is so far in our rear-view mirror that fact-checking has become a futile exercise. The National Guard is now deployed in Memphis and Trump hopes to similarly desensitise the populace to soldier-lined streets in Chicago, and Portland.
The last time we went downtown on a weekend night, there seemed to be far fewer people out than usual, likely for a host of reasons, all emanating from that big white house down the road a bit.
So, nobody knows what will happen any more, and that’s certainly one of their prime directives. In nine months, they’ve blown up enough of the norms that fasten democracy to have shaken its, and our, very core.
And yet the buses and subways still run. The store shelves and petrol pumps are expensive but full. You can now – and could even before our streets were militarised – go to a movie and dinner safely and happily. There are two houses for sale nearby, so we and some freighbours – that’s friends plus neighbours – traipsed through the open houses last weekend. You know, normal suburban Sunday jollies.
But nothing’s really normal, and far too late we’ve realised just how underrated normal was. And while we’re scrambling to regain some, the bad guys have taken a blowtorch to the Constitution so they can upload billions in crypto, prosecute their political enemies, make their daily deportation quotas, and carry out a whole slate of jackbooted activities. The really scary part is they’re not trying to hide it anymore.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
