I’m not much of a hand for praying anymore. More and more over the years it has come to seem too much like an implicit abdication of responsibility for desired outcomes. Still, thanks to many decades of indoctrination, I do occasionally slip into prayerful attitudes toward coming events. They can range from the outcome of a Super Bowl to the results of a biopsy. It’s less prayer in the popular sense than hope and wishful thinking.
Thus during the last couple of weeks I’ve kind of had my fingers crossed that none of the celebrants and marchers in the much-advertised “No Kings Day” would get too pushy with the understandably nervous members of the various constabularies assigned to police them. The last thing we needed was to trigger a pepper ball or teargas response by the cops and an excuse for the would-be king himself to muster a military presence in previously undisturbed cities and towns.
The nearest demonstration to Bea and me last weekend was in Swampscott, along the beach road between Lynn and Marblehead. I didn’t really want to spend an hour or two standing beside the road (which the cops would keep open; it’s a main route), and I didn’t fancy lugging a folding lawn chair or making a catchy sign. But we signed up, anyway. I planned to drive through the crowd at its peak, honking and sticking my fist out through the moon roof in solidarity.
Luckily, the weather was perfect, the crowd was substantial and cheerful, the signs were really creative, and even the cops along the way were smiling. The traffic, for obscure reasons, was intense. Confused dogs peeped out here and there from between their owners’ knees. On the ocean side, a heavy surf broke over the beach. It may have been an “Antifa crowd” or the “Marxist left wing” or the “Hate America Faction,” as the president and vice-president claimed, but it was a damned sight more fun than the right-wing gang, and clearly where we belonged.
I’ve been delighted ever since that morning to see the drone photos of the crowds that assembled in other, larger venues from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Predictably, the governors of some red states threatened to mobilize the National Guard against the violence they claimed to fear. Apparently, none occurred.
There’s an undercurrent of hostility, however, that’s caused these massive responses. Many American citizens are afraid to venture outdoors where and when the masked agents of ICE are deployed. I know one person, a card-carrying American citizen of Mexican descent with a Hispanic name, is fearful of flying because of the cruel and random nature of arrests (kidnappings in many cases) and transportation to far-off holding facilities where he may or may not receive a hearing before being disappeared. I call him “card-carrying” because for the first time in his life he feels he has to carry his passport everywhere he goes, though he fears it will help him very little if the masked goons decide he’s a threat to the United States.
We are truly in uncharted waters during this administration’s tenure. Its modus operandi, as one commentator points out, is to see how much it can get away with. Normally, Congress would check its extralegal attempts to govern its way (I can recall Congress, in a panic over the possibility of Harry Truman gaining another term, like his predecessor, passing term limit legislation). But this Congress, in a preemptive master stroke planned and executed by someone far sharper than the president, has been rendered utterly supine, hugging their jobs like fluffy toys and more terrified of the president’s wrath than that of their constituents, whose power is in turn being diminished by high-speed gerrymandering. And the Roberts Supreme Court, whose name will live on in the same ignominy as that of the Taney Court, can no longer be relied upon for even its vaunted originalism.
To me, the most shocking event of the weekend (I had quite expected the president to demean the protesters as “leftist lunatics,” which he did) was the AI-generated video he posted on the internet. In it, wearing a crown, he climbs into a jet fighter labeled “King Trump” and flies over crowds of demonstrators below, dropping gobs of liquid sewage upon them. It’s not only as gross as anyone can get; it also demonstrates how far we’ve fallen since the days of, say, Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Our beautiful democratic system is recalling Ben Franklin’s warning: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Still, along with the protesters, I am prayerfully hopeful.
