In Our Time

I was sitting on the terrace the other day trying not to think about the hantavirus when I found myself wondering how this time – our time - will appear in the history books of the future, assuming there are some. How will it be understood? How will it be taught? What will it even be called?

I do this every now and then to tamp down nausea and to give myself some distance on the atrocities of the moment. By thinking about what might be written about this mad decade in the future, I’m able to imagine it being in the past.

I’d have been better off thinking about the hantavirus.

I say this in all sincerity: If you’re reading these posts thinking they’ll provide answers, you took the wrong exit off the freeway. Though I taught American history for years, I don’t really understand what’s happening now and have no idea how historians will interpret it. It fits no conceptual frame, aligns with no historical precedent. We seem to have left the past behind almost entirely.

How can I say this when the parallels between the Trump administration and the fascist movements of the 20^th century are so glaringly obvious? When Project 2025 follows the established authoritarian blueprint? When history is littered with narcissists, paranoiacs, murderers and fools much like our current crop of ‘leaders’?

I can say it because there’s an element of unreason in the air, a whiff of madness, that defies explanation. This is what troubles me. I understand, mostly, the ways of power; the ways of insanity confound me.

How does advising people to spend more time in tanning beds to build up a ‘solar callus’ (giving more people melanoma), benefit Trump and his congressional enablers?

What about gutting veterans’ benefits?

Or cutting agency after agency on which voters depend - including their voters?

One minute he’s threatening to annihilate an entire civilization, the next he’s posting pictures of himself and his Secretary of State and some woman in a bikini floating in the Reflecting Pool.

Something about this doesn’t compute. This is not the path to power, a la Orban. This is something else.

When Evangelical and Jewish religious leaders gather on a golf course for the unveiling of “Don Colossus,” Trump’s latest statue of himself, to himself, it’s something else.

When the Presidential motorcade drives up the middle of the drained Reflecting Pool so our leader can inspect the paint job, it’s something else.

But madness aside, maybe there’s an angle.

Generally speaking, the battles of the past - even those fought for fantastical ideological or religious reasons - were beholden to empirical fact. A battle lost was a battle lost. Bodies had weight. Propaganda might shape or distort the outcome, of course, but propaganda existed because there was this thing called reality that people believed in, that had dominion, and that therefore had to be manipulated, denied, assaulted.

This – this thing we’re seeing – is quite possibly something new under the sun. Certainly under the American sun. It’s not just propaganda, it’s a wholesale assault on reality, and its distinguishing characteristic is its crudity. There’s not even an attempt at a fig leaf. When reality doesn’t suit, this administration declares its own by fiat.

Hence, the economy is booming, January 6^th didn’t happen, the Iran war is over and Trump is a paragon of health.

If those in power agree that these things are so, who are you to say they’re not?

If it’s difficult getting our heads around the new dispensation, it’s because we’re creatures of reality. Our sanity depends on it. We pledge our allegiance to it all the livelong day. This may be doubly true of professionals - historians, lawyers and the like.

It may take a novelist to think outside the box. Or two, as the case may be.

---

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man argues that freedom is the freedom to be irrational, even self-destructive - to declare that 2 + 2 = 5 in the face of reason. Eighty or so years later, Orwell argued the enemy was not rational determinism (the prison of 2 + 2 = 4), but the lie that 2 + 2 = 5. Freedom, for Orwell, wasn’t irrationality but truth, and our duty was to cling to it in the face of power.

What does all this have to do with the Trump administration’s assault on reality? Simply this: The administration has weaponized the force of irrationality, convinced an entire segment of the American electorate that saying 2 + 2 = 5 is an expression of freedom, or self-determination.

‘You’ve been diminished by others’ reality for too long,’ the unstated argument runs. ‘You can declare your own truth. Own the libs!’

---

---

If history is written by the victors, a corollary for our time may be that reality is a function of force.

Game it out: The November election arrives at last, and despite all the Republicans’ efforts – despite their gerrymandering, despite the Supreme Court’s partisanship – American voters deliver a Hungary-sized electoral victory.

Or do they? In the face of all evidence, Trump declares a victory of historic proportions. Millions, he claims, are cheering in the streets. Everything else is fake news.

What happens next? X number of legislators have lost office, but someone has to remove them from the premises. Literally. What if they choose not to go?

What if the Trump administration, declaring itself the overwhelming winner, refuses to leave? What if – as seems to be the case, lately – they actually believe it? What then? Who do you call? The FBI? Justice? Treasury? Ghostbusters? Who, exactly, is going to compel them to acknowledge facts, to admit that 2+2=4?

So there’s the question: When all is done and written, will Trump have ushered in an era of un-reality? Or will America have folded him into the history books as the psychotic episode he was, because we insisted we could add.

---