Six Months After the Election, the Body Still Aches

Here we are, six months after the election, and the texture of my days has changed. The causes are not to be found in the streets. I’m not afraid of deportation and my healthcare isn’t threatened. As to that, let me deflect from the start the charge that a woman of privilege has no clue. I live my own subjective reality and it’s been rattled in ways I wouldn’t have expected.

For starters, there is the vertigo. Perhaps the American century ended at 9/11 and American exceptionalism around the same time, but I didn’t lay them to rest until November 9. And on that day, those abstract concepts sprang to life for me in a way they only could with their dying. In the weeks after the election, I saw what they had meant. With every trashed norm and indignity, the meaning of America or the ideal of America past seemed to emerge in the rearview mirror. It was as if I had been walking on a granite sidewalk, not really paying much attention, leaving it to the autonomic nervous system to navigate terra firma. And then the sidewalk turned to unstable planking. Still, I walked, but now every step was something to consider. Now it was front of mind and a source of constant, low-level anxiety. Andrew Sullivan wrote that one of the blessings of stable and relatively responsive government is that you don’t need to think about it on a daily basis. It is merely background for real life. In autocracy, the whims of the leader, along with his framing of reality, threaten to become real life.

Then there are the jitters. The Twitter #resistance quickly filled up my feed and Twitter pulled me into its frantic, angry, sometimes empathic slipstream. Constantly. I’m Twitter twitchy. The service is inimical to peace and concentration and gratitude — the qualities of mind and heart that prayer supports. And yet it became for me a practice of sorts. I found on twitter incantations of the Zion we’ve lost, and our path to return. I saw in the posts and their frequency that others were similarly knocked out. They too had returned from airport protests shattered that this was now our America, and it had happened all at once. I have been taking it in hour by hour: Amy Siskind’s list of White House insanity or inanity, Derek Nelson’s weekly action items of resistance, the premonitions of authoritarianism, the threads on impeachment, the media criticism, the catalogs of corruption, the islamophobia watch, the calls on flippable districts, and the accounts of policy fails and mislaid armadas that are equal parts schadenfreude and terror.

On top of this, there’s the whiplash. The malevolence and incompetence, the know-nothingism, the chest-pounding, word tossing, petulant reversing, and uxorious lying — it’s all so much worse because six months ago, we were in Obama’s America. Here I’m referring not to his policies, but to his deliberateness. This was a man who weighed his words at the Turkey pardon. His cool was care. He chose his words, always, as if they mattered, even when they didn’t really, but he gave you the impression that everything he said was considered. To be suddenly cast into our world, where nothing means anything, where the messaging is glandular and a grunt or giggle would do as well, is to be snapped violently when you were looking the other way.

And then finally, I am concussed. Because the blows are brutal, as they are intended to be, as they are in a colosseum, more brutal because they are delivered for sport and theater. They are meant as communicative violence. When unoffending kids are rounded up or made to fear that they will be, the purpose is to “send a message.” As clearly as the MOAB, or the would-be tanks at inauguration, a physical embodiment of the bloodlusty “lock her up” chant that they can’t even now let go. So too when men who know better stick their fingers in their ears and mock climate worriers with a “la la la we can’t hear you, suckers.” The carnival barker is putting on a show with simulated violence and risky maneuvers and attractive models. It’s so brash and noisy that when the violence becomes real, it seems like maybe it’s not or maybe it doesn’t matter.

I haven’t been hit literally, so why does it feel that way? Why does it feel like I would do well to convalesce in a dark room, without Twitter? His supporters will say because I’m a snowflake dealt a shock and I need to “stop crying in my latte.” (Some of us drink it black, fuckers). But the shock wasn’t to me. It was to the office of the Presidency, the unquestioned (and therefore unremarkable) respect for the judiciary and rule of law, the possibility of shame, the national language at least of compassion and hope. It’s the dislodging of those things that has concussed. People say that this is September 12, 2001 — only a prolonged version of it. The collective “whuuut?” might be similar, but something very different is happening. Then, we waited to be called to our better natures and to rally in defense of the nation. (Instead, we were told to go shopping). Now, we’ve called ourselves to action. An army of jittery, dizzy, headachy, resisters is rising. On my good days, I feel like these are the Patriots and this is the real American spirit, and we will prevail. On my mad ones, I fear that we too are in the Truman Show, playing our parts in the carnival to provide more color. The good day vision has to be right. Or it’s dark rooms for all of us.