Marvin the Martian
Am I the only one who has noticed how much Elon Musk resembles this Looney Tunes character, with his small head and oversize helmet, his nerdy, patrician cadences, and technobabble: "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!", "Isn't that lovely?", "This makes me very angry, very angry indeed", and his constant references to his "Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator". Musk coming on stage in Wisconsin, wearing an oversize cheese hat, confirmed the resemblance. Continuing the analogy, Elmer Fudd has won the presidency; but where is Bugs Bunny, so desperately needed now?
Kristi Noem
The photograph of Noem posing, wearing a $20,000 Rolex, in front of a cage of barechested, tattooed men with shaven heads in El Salvador, will certainly be one of the iconic photographs of this historical era. People may write future PhD theses unpacking it. Noem has become exemplary for me of the somewhat normal-looking human lacking any recognizable human qualities, of truth or compassion (and the first, by the way, is of little value without the other). I imagine rooms full of these people interacting with one another; say Trump, Laura Loomer, and J.D. Vance, talking a recognizably inflected and vocabularied English, without an iota of knowledge as to what is missing from the room. Such people thrive as hothouse flowers (special snowflakes, ha) under very fragile conditions which (incurable optimist) I hope will not pertain very long. Because government inevitably arrives at moments (think a recession (caused by tariffs) or a hurricane (fueled by climate change)) in which truth (no "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") and compassion (no throwing rolls of toilet paper at traumatized citizens) are the only qualities needed.
Reliance
A little-analyzed aspect of government and of society in general is reliance. Think of popular culture and movies, of recurring tropes or dialog such as "I trusted you" and "my word is my bond". Think about it that way, and the routines of daily life are highly based on reliance. I remember from my childhood, Benny's, the store on the corner of Ocean and M: without much thinking about it, we knew that the store would be open most of every day, that Benny would be inside, that the quart of milk he sold you would not be spoiled, that he would make an egg cream if you asked.
We are often heartbroken when reliances end due to outside circumstances: Benny closes one day, for example, because he can no longer afford rising rents. There is still human agency involved-- Benny alone is powerless, his landlord is not-- but it is remote, beyond Benny's reach and our own. I think also of the survivors of slain police officers, whose pensions are discontinued when the municipality itself goes bankrupt.
But today we live, at least for a while, in a polity where our own leadership may decide to opportunistically chop us up, like krill rendered into a paste. Donald Trump, who pays bills when he feels like it, and will throw anyone under the bus for as little benefit as a sound byte, was always destined to play this role. Whether you, American human, enjoy the spectacle of others being chopped up, or are heartbroken, it is possible that neither of you is focused on the reliance factor. Think of a young person in a foreign country who trusted America with their life, future, and tuition, came here to seek an education, only to discover this week after years of study, loneliness and expense, that their visa had been terminated,often enough for reasons they don't know. Thank you for playing; goodbye!
A Bucket List Item
During the Pandemic, in my reading for my endless Mad Manuscript (now almost 16,000 pages) I came across "The Ladder of Monks", an English translation of a short essay on sacred reading by one Guigo, a medieval monk. I thought for some reason how lovely it would be to be able to read it in the original, and I signed up for an online Latin class, taught by a remarkable polymath young man with the same first name as me, who sometimes used toys and stuffed animals to act out Latin phrases. Four years later, when the present emergency hit, I became too busy with pro bono work, much of it for students including the ones adverted to above, to continue doing the week's homework. This felt at first like a bitter failure; I wasn't nearly as fluent as I had hoped to be in that time. But, after about a year deprived of the class, I began reading Guigo's Scala Claustraliam, in the original, a few sentences a week. Yesterday, after about six months of intermittently reading an eleven page work, I finished it. What an immense Click, and feeling of intense relief, ensued. I am still not fluent in Latin; but I became fluent in Guigo: even in that short a work, the knowledge of what the author has just said,and the words they used, informs your expectations as to what follows. You make a connection. The essay ends: “Ut sic cortina cortinam trahat, et qui audit, dicat: veni”. Let curtain draw curtain, and he who hears, say “Come”.