Saturday and a rebel yell....
Plus, what the major media are kinda-sorta totally missing about Trump's nominees.
12.7.24. A Saturday. The actual weekend day I have promised to adopt as a stand-in day for all of 2025, as a strategy to make my life feel like a year of less-stressful, open, unstructured days, rather than the dutiful, work-filled other days of the week. I suppose I knew, even before the election results, that I would need a proactive strategy to endure 2025, if Trump was re-elected. I knew during all of 2025, rushing toward the windmills a la Don Quixote, as it felt (not in purpose or impact, but in momentum… full on, not looking back or aside…clear about the mission and the odds — tell everyone about Project 2025’s threat) so urgently necessary, that I would then need a corrective year, to rebalance this all-out effort. So adoptive Saturdays is the strategy.
Which leaves real Saturdays for another kind of challenge.
Today I woke like a child at Christmas, eager at the prospect of a gift. I received a copy of Rupert Thomson’s memoir, This Party’s Got To Stop, which I thought was going to be a fun read through some drug- and sex- and art-filled London or European 90s to now. I am so ready to be at such parties, even if I’d be the sober new non-alcoholic fancy beer drinker, and I can’t actually dance at the moment, having developed a new ailment this summer. Plantar fasciitis. Oy. Another unwelcome reminder that I’m not in my 20s or able to jump up and dance into oblivion to Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, though, in spirit, I do, I can, I might yet today, you never know.
This is an indulgent aside, but, in thinking about Rupert and his glory days in London, which I assumed his memoir was about, I’ll just say, I did see Idol in concert on a freezing weekend in London – was it mid-80s, or later, early 90s? -- when everyone and their brother was dressed punk, for real, faces and clothes full of safety pins, just a massive tide of torn tartan spilling out of the Tube (love that name for their subway) like a million salmon upriver. It was so grand. I saw the Slits for the first time then, too. I was with a NY girlfriend at the time, and her friend. We ate baked beans in our cold, cheap digs. I remember feeling like I was in the center of the universe, the universe I wanted to be in, which was the same general period of time when, in NY, I was seeing Patti Smith and Elvis Costello and all these amazing performers and everything felt exactly right in terms of where one should be.
I’ll assume Rupert, who is just a little older than I am, but so much more accomplished as a writer and novelist, might have also been at that very concert. I’m so certain he would have been punked up. Can I just say here, second aside, that it was extremely wonderful to see so many snarling London kids with their hair in astonishing sharp spiked and shaved styles back then? I remember we headed for Vivian Westwood’s World’s End fashion shop in some far corner from where we were, it took forever to try to go, and I can’t remember if we even made it, but it didn’t matter, all of London was a punk fashion dream, and I felt so much less adventurous and rough around the edges as the Brit kids. I soaked it all up, and I can still remember how great it felt, how lucky I was to have been there, with a fucking gorgeous Billy in his White Wedding glory moment, his deep voice urging everyone into frenzied stomping mosh pit religion.
So, back to my earlier Saturday waking. I got my coffee, cracked open Rupert’s memoir, and right away, I knew this was going to be another kind of party. A very sad one, for starters. Rupert has had a very tough time; he lost his mum when he was nine, then later his dad, and the book opens when he is in Berlin, and learns his father has died.
Crap, I think, I wanted a fun read. I need escape from the fascists. And from my plantar fasciitis, which I regard as a metaphor for the pain in my heel that Trump and Project 2025 have become, a daily, by-the-minute reminder that they are underfoot, threatening to wreck our daily lives and the road forward.
So I read to page 18, when I stopped. It’s going to be a great memoir, I can tell, but it’s already so sad, and I just can’t take more sad right now, because so many of my friends and the larger American world is super-sad and scared about Trump. Unhinged Trump 2.0. But I did extract this beautiful sentence, which I’m sharing because, even in the midst of sadness, it’s necessary to focus on beauty. Rupert’s words are beautiful and lit is my balm. Here is what I have kept, like a line swirling in my brain, because it can be applied so widely, to so many realities, including our descent into US illiberalism now:
‘The world, like a bowl filled to the brim with water, is something that can be dropped or spilled.’ (pg. 11, about how he feels, learning about his father’s death, back home in the UK while he is in Berlin, living with a German girlfriend his father never approved of….)
Is that how my head feels now? No, not really. But that is how I feel our American nation feels now, and how almost everyone I know feels now, who is advance-mourning the possible end of democracy, which is the linch-pin of our identity as Americans, our origin story belief in our goodness, or at least the goodness of democratic ideals, namely a belief in equality and everyone getting some fair share of the pie of life, even though we all know the pie was baked from some fucked-up ingredients, including slavery and white man’s colonization of everyone here before the Europeans fleeing a king’s tyranny arrived and soon acted like tyrannical kings.
Following me here?
‘The world, like a bowl filled to the brim with water, is something that can be dropped or spilled.’
It’s true. When I pick up the phone, which I did, right after putting Rupert’s childhood cri de coeur story down, that’s how the news of the world feels. Like things are coming apart, faster than we can possibly hold them together. The bowl of our known lives is leaking from so many places. How do we prevent that? Where do we start? How can we walk so carefully now that we preserve as much as we can of what we hold precious?
Maybe I’ll tape Rupert’s beautiful word metaphor to the wall above my head. Or not. Maybe it’s enough to have it inside my own brimming head. I’ll do that. I’ll drop the words into my head and let them dilute, filter down. Thing is, I need easy Saturdays for all of 2025, not a spilt bowl of lost democracy.
I’ve put Rupert aside. I want an easy Saturday, but, truth be told, I also want to finish the work I’ve assigned myself over a week ago that is taking way, way, way, too long to complete. It’s my fault: I want to learn, I need to know. For myself, first, then to share with others. I need to know who these miscreants are, eager to spill the bowl of our lives.
I’m talking about Trump’s nominees for Cabinet, and the other high-up positions of his incoming administration. Let me correct that: they aren’t solely Trump’s choices, which the media annoyingly repeat as truth, because they aren’t bothering to dig more deeply. It’s plain as day clear to me, after researching just a few of these individuals, that they’re the choices of the men and women who put Trump in office. The Christian true believers. Leonard Leo and his kind. The dark money Christian nationalist kingmakers.
That’s right. That’s the glaring omission I keep seeing every day, every few hours, when I check my phone and news feeds or headlines for how it’s all going down. From the NY Times on down, they are totally missing the crux of the story. The most important aspect of the nominees and this new government, which is that they are, almost all, serious Christian zealots. I mean, the news stories do mention this about some of the nominees like Russell Vought, who is the man who has recruited so many of these folks to serve Trump 2.0, and muscle-bound Pete Hegseth, with his aggro Christendom Crusader tattoos, and a few others. But they have missed the connecting major thread linking almost all of them to the deeper, more important agenda of this new chapter of illiberalism: the advent of US theocracy.
I gave myself the task of researching how the candidates are connected to Project 2025, which a few other journos have also done. It’s not hard, but it takes time. And I’m such a digger, such a little dog searching for a bone buried under the sand, that I can’t stop once I start looking. I have to know how much of a true believer these folks are. I have to spend too many hours, sometimes fruitlessly, looking for the church they belong to, the end-times pastor they follow. I have to go looking for who they are close to, who is funding - or has funded - their ascent into politics and MAGAland fame. And, unfortunately, it’s taken me longer than I thought. It’s stolen more of my everyday-is-like-Saturday schedule. I want to be done already, so I can share it with others in our Resisting Project 2025 ‘stack. But I’m still not quite done.
This morning I got through another five or so profiles. Learned all but one fellow were hardline believers that Jesus will only return if we all commit to making the US a holy land, and if we help the Jews in Israel expand their territory as a precondition for the return of the Savior in a thousand or so years.
How, when, did so many otherwise seemingly smart Americans dip into wildman Christian prophecy territory? Also, how is it that Florida has produced so many of Trump’s choice holy warriors? There are a lot of things to notice and write about the current crop of nominees, in addition to their truly horrible vision for remaking America into a kleto-theocracy. I am honestly capping myself and my inquiry off at the knees, metaphorically, to focus on producing a tight capsule of the highlights of each nominee. But I have to tell you — to bear witness, as I promised myself — that this is a very sobering research exercise.
I have to tell you, the media is missing perhaps this most important story, which is the arrival of a theocratic regime. That’s the agenda behind the agenda of conservative deregulation and let’s-burn-it-all-down gutting of the administrative state, and the McCarthyite blacklists that are publicly circulating with the names of Biden and other deemed enemies of the state.
We know a future Special Prosecutor will be named, possibly as early as “Day One” of the new administration. We know it will feel like Nixon and McCarthy, and a band of criminals in the White House. We know Stephen Miller is a modern version of Roy Cohn and that Trump’s FBI will make Hoover’s look like softies, compared to the investigations into people who Miller et al. view as un-American now, who need to be arrested and punished, jailed or sent to exile. The purge is on; it’s coming. We know that (those of us who aren’t pretending anyway) it will be far worse than what’s written on paper, in Project 2025, even.
The theocracy is coming. It’s here.
That’s the part that we have failed to fully absorb, to really consider. The implications of this, the meaning of this for America. We have never been a theocratic state. In fact, we as Americans have been generally keen to denounce oppressive religious regimes -- the mullahs in Iraq or Afghanistan or the oil-rich Saudis, the rulers of Islamic countries who rule by Sharia. But here we are, taking clear, firm steps, with Trump 2.0.
It doesn’t matter that Trump isn’t himself a true believer, that’s he just using the Christian right as a power base. He’s not choosing the nominees; he’s just agreeing with the lists being given to him by the powers-that-be who are leading him, advising him, who funded him, who have all the ideas, who wrote Project 2025. Trump is willing to have the Bible be the foundation of US law and policy as long as he’s in charge.
So that’s what I’ve culled, over the past ten days. The evidence of the creation of a theocratic government-in-waiting.
It’s not as if this is exactly news, either. The fact of some being Christian nationalists. It’s not. Lots of news stories over the years and now do mention that so-and-so is a devout Catholic or evangelical Christian. But to see the list of names, to read about them, one after another, to link the dots and discover just how many are genuine drink-the-Koolaid-true-believers? The majority. Well, that’s sobering. It’s definitely made me feel, a la Rupert, that I must walk down the hallways of my own mind carefully, take pains not to spill, in order to maintain my own balance and not fall into fear or despair, as I honestly see many doing among my peers, or – equally unhelpful – into a kind of shut-down paralysis, an I-can’t-take-more attitude or mentality toward this political moment.
We can’t shut down, we have to look, we have to dig, we have to write it down for others to know. We have to and we will bear witness. At least I will, in my own small way, inside my overfull mindbowl of information about this new regime, what’s coming, what’s being put in place.
Image: Istock
So that’s my Saturday. So far. I’m happy to report I have more real fun ahead, though my research into Trumpdom 2.0 provides a kind of grim satisfaction, especially when I unearth, as I did this morning, hard evidence of someone’s bonafides as a member of some Florida end-times prosperity megachurch. I have had aha moments all week that make me feel a deep muckraker reporter’s dose of satisfaction that only facts can provide. So while it’s a grim trek, it’s not without its highlights.
Anyway, about fun. It’s coming today, soon. I’m going to visit an old friend on the Upper West Side who is a writer and loose diarist like I’ve re-become here. She writes about everything, and cares less than I do about keeping track of the thread of the story. For her the asides are the glints of gold in anyone’s life story, the things we did when we were supposed to be doing something else. What turned out to be even more fun than what we had planned. She has had a lot of misadventures that make for great stories.
Anyway, I’m excited to be going to see her. Plus, she loves dumplings as much as I do and we always have them for lunch. And she’s older than I am by quite a few years, but no older in her head, in her creative venturing, which also calms me. She’s parting the waters of my future, and it’s not as scary as it might be. She’s having a blast, she told me on the phone, hanging out with a new bunch of younger friends. So I’m eager to hear how she is enduring the start of the fall of the empire.
That said, I’m running late to see her. Though I just called and she forgot, though she knew I was visiting and had put a note in big red letters on her calendar. So we’re both late and that seems apt for this political moment, too. And, yes, an aside (smile), I do like to be someone’s capital red letter day visitor. A good kind of red letter event, then.
Plus, she just confirmed we’re having dumplings. Aside from coffee, dumplings are a guarantee of joy for me.
And later, I’m going to be reading from my actual fun unpublished romcom novel at a Faeries Salon my 90s friend Suzanne is organizing, in Gowanus. A year ago, or was it two?, she hosted the first Salon and I read the first chapter of the romcom. Except then it was only two chapters, and some raw writing that I hadn’t committed to shaping. The salon guests were so enthusiastic in their reception, laughing at all the right moments, that a week later, I decided to at least finish the excerpt. Make it into a long short story or novella maybe, then publish it. Then I sat down to do that, and, amazeballs, I just kept sitting down, day after day, very early, at 6 a.m, with a coffee, cuz I had to be at paid work by 10, uptown. I just amused myself, giggling in the morning. The story just wrote itself. And five weeks later, major major amazeballs, the story was done. A friggin big ass novel, light as a feather. Totally outside my own lit wheelhouse, honestly. Surprise, surprise.
We all need to laugh, that I know.
And so tonight, I’ll read an excerpt from somewhere further along in the romcom. I had a moment of thinking I’d read from this living-through-autocracy ‘diary instead, but no, we need light, we need mirth, we need to keep the overfull hot bowl of our heads and lives level, like a warm bath to dip into, a singing monks bowl of meditation, not a spillover into future political misery.
So that’s my Saturday morning report. More to come. But first, more fun.