Ongoing preparations
The political world spins slowly but in an obvious direction... Ending chapters and beginning new ones... A goodbye to the last great president.
The TVs in my gym have been a helpful reminder that the world continues to spin in grim ways. Especially over the last week, as I’ve gathered with family and been mostly away from the news, the shining boxes hanging over the treadmills have provided a reality check to the relative un-reality of a peaceful family holiday, the words and chyrons relaying the disturbing political path we’ve set ourselves on.
“Illegal immigrant accused of burning woman alive,” Fox News told me the other day. The immigrant had, of course, for narrative’s sake, been deported under Trump only to return and commit their crime — an entirely anecdotal piece of evidence that suggests non-citizens are preying on Americans, and only Trump can save us.
“Dem strategist declares party brand is in the toilet,” I learned next. A lovely selection of words blasted out to millions of Americans on Christmas Eve, I thought.
On one of my mercifully few trips online to see what the news had to tell, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s immigration plans are off to a rip-roaring start.
“America’s private prison complex gears up for Trump deportation bonanza,” the newspaper reported. That’s pretty grim, but this is actually very familiar territory for me because I already wrote this story when the same thing happened eight years ago, albeit under the (more correct) headline “Private Prison Companies Ready to Cash In on Throwing Out Immigrants.”
Meanwhile, the newspaper also reported that some fine folks in Indiana are looking forward to the migrant purges Trump is promising. “For many people in this small town, deportations can’t come soon enough,” the headline read.
Do I need to read these stories to find a nugget of capitalistic normalcy in a story about the blood money our private prison industry is clamoring for under the incoming Trump administration, or to grasp the nuance of a town full of Americans who yearn for their neighbors to be deported? Or are the headlines enough to understand exactly what it is I’m looking at?
For now, at least, seeing these headlines and passing on reading the stories accompanying them is fine by me. For the moment, I have no interest in trying to understand a party and a people whose primary driving instinct appears to be selfishness and fear. Also, I don’t really have time for it. As we wind down this transition period and prepare for the onslaught of madness that will be the next Trump administration, I am wrapping up my book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened.
Preparing for the madness to come
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