A few months ago I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker. In it, a king stands on his raised veranda with an aide, looking down on an obviously angry crowd armed with pitchforks and torches. Nonplussed, he turns to his courtier, who advises something like this: “You don’t have to put anyone down, sire. You just have to convince the torch people that the pitchfork people are trying to take their torches.”
In the political condition in which the United States currently finds itself, that cartoon was (as we used to say in grammar school) about as funny as a rubber crutch. Because it’s true. The architects, authors and advance-persons of the system creating for our president a gilded, entitled image of himself have succeeded far better than many of us who’ve been around a while thought they could.
Even here in Vermont, where it’s been fairly easy for many of us to feel that we’re living in a bubble, in a blip beneath the radar, we’re beginning to feel it. Chicago and Portland, Oregon, may get all the media attention, but we’re now attracting the notice of the expanding crowd of masked, black-clad, largely anonymous goons with a clearly vague grasp of Constitutional law and a lively sense of mission — that mission being to rid the country of non- or not-quite-white people who’re probably violent members of some Latin American terrorist group stealing American jobs.
A film worth seeing if you ever get a chance is “Das Leben der Anderen” (“The Lives of Others”). It won many awards when it was released in 2006. Set in Communist East Germany, it follows the efforts of the Stasi, the secret police, to record and transcribe everything that’s spoken in the apartment of a journeyman playwright, a suspected enemy of the state. It’s a great plot, but to me the most memorable feature of the film is its recreation of the universal suspicion that pervaded East German society. The government so thoroughly managed to plant the fear of spies (in our current American parlance, “the enemy within”) that offering an opinion to anyone else, even a supposedly trusted friend, is dangerous and possibly lethal. The effect is ominous, threatening and draped in gray and black.
There’s no doubt that we here in the so-called united states are operating on the fringes of that mutual and universal suspicion. Reading the various responses to a Facebook post about people detained in the Northeast Kingdom is quite an eye-opener. Most respondents (this is, after all, Vermont) are offended and outraged at their treatment. A few suggest detainment is only a mild inconvenience, and bona fide citizens are soon on their merry way.
So it’s come to Vermont, with an apparent focus on the northern part of the state, where Canada disgorges felons and undocumented migrants into the brave little state whose Republican governor has so far politely declined to hold tea parties and all-you-can-eat buffets for the brutish chaps and women in the unmarked black vehicles.
It’s nothing new. Even before the American Revolution, we were at each other’s throats in legislative debate. The November 2025 issue of The Atlantic describes our founders’ travails in breaking with our motherland. Perhaps the most persuasive voice for revolution was an immigrant pamphleteer (undocumented; the paperwork jad yet to be invented), Thomas Paine, in his publication “Common Sense.” Patriots and Loyalists were irreconcilable. As the revolutionary spirit grew, Loyalists with valuable property and land fled for their lives to the Eastern Townships of Quebec (you probably can guess who got their abandoned property). To this day, the Anglican Church and the English language are common throughout the townships.
We deplore the black vehicles that cruise Chicago (San Francisco would have been next but for the intervention of “some friends of mine” who dissuaded the president from sending them). We’ve been at this sort of thing forever, almost all of our country’s life. The British burned the White House; now our own president is tearing it down. General Lee and General Sherman taught us to deplore the sound of alien marching feet on our soil. Important bureaus of our government are commanded by political hacks.
We’ve been conditioned to dislike and distrust each other, to take by force the pitchforks or torches of our adversaries. Every day we’re thrown another issue to fight over, to distract us from demanding information that will change almost everything. The Stasi files, now open, make interesting reading, as will the inevitable release of whatever the Justice Department is hiding in the Epstein files. Let’s do it.
