March 22, 2025

It is March the 22nd. We are past the equinox and spring has sprung. In Birmingham, we’re having a sunny, but cool day, the flowering trees and shrubs are starting to show out, and the birds outside of my condo seem to be particularly happy about something. As it is also Sondheim’s birthday (his 95th and the 4th since his apotheosis at Thanksgiving 2021) which is one of my personal holidays. I suppose I could spend my retirement years pushing for Sondheim awareness and devising the just so ways of celebrating Sondheim-mas every 22nd of March – a national toast of vodka stingers at noon, a celebratory recitation of The Story of Lucy and Jessie before the evening meal, ‘Don’t Touch the Coat’ sales at Macy’s. But I think there are, perhaps more important calls on my time and energy.

I continue to be as befuddled as the next American of reasonable education and moderate intellect at the explosion of relative insanity emanating from Washington DC over the last week. I am not the person to collect and analyze all of the actions and repercussions of the administration’s actions and Trump’s endless stream of executive orders. I’ll leave that to the trained political scientists and historians who are sifting through the wreckage and trying to make sense of it all. One of the first things I do in the morning, after Wordle, is to read Heather Cox Richardson’s piece from the previous evening summarizing the political events of the day and contextualizing them within the arc of American history, pulling out parallels from the last three hundred years. If you haven’t discovered her yet, look her up.

I have noticed a number of themes and variations that are making themselves known. First, while it all seems like chaos, this has all been carefully planned and orchestrated by the Trump team and the work likely took several years. There are too many results too quickly. If it were happening in an off the cuff manner on whims, there would just be a big muddle and not much forward momentum. Second, the administration is determined to shred the idea of three coequal branches of government (and if there is a first among equals in the constitution, it’s the legislative as that is the branch that represents the people) in favor of an authoritarian unitary executive. The fact that the legislative seems to be rolling over and playing dead with a few notable exceptions like Bernie and AOC makes little sense to me. Does the administration have kompromat on them all? Are they that scared of the MAGA true believers harming them personally if they foil any of dear leaders plans? Is there money changing hands in ways we are not privy to? Well, that last one is always true no matter where you go in politics. Third, the political party that made an art form out of judge shopping and using the federal judiciary to create injunctions based in politics rather than in legal theory (see the career of Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of Amarillo Texas) has now decided that a judge should not be able to stop any action of the executive, no matter how illegal it may be. The lawyers issuing forth from DOJ are going before the bench with arguments and preparedness that would have gotten them laughed out of first year law school and the judiciary is starting to clap back. It also shows just what kind of ‘only the best people’ are left at DOJ. On a tangential note, I have heard that the Kennedy Center is canceling a planned production of the musical ‘Legally Blonde’. I wonder what the objectionable material is – the gay character or the portrayal of competent legal counsel.

The most dangerous things happening are those happening on the immigration front, whether it is high profile deportations of physicians and scientists or the keeping of ordinary European tourists with visa paperwork problems in chains for weeks. Each one of these cases is being used to test the boundaries of what the administration can get away with. While the victims of these actions are probably random, my guess is that the types of cases are not and they are all being used to build, bit by bit, an infernal machine dealing in human misery. The rendition flights of the Venezuelans to El Salvador are particularly troubling as there seems to have only been the most slapdash vetting of the cases and those unfortunates have been marched into a gulag from which it may be very difficult for them to win release. I was taught in elementary school civics that the American justice system was built on the idea of innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and that it was better that ten guilty people should go free rather than one innocent one be convicted. We seem to have thrown that whole basic ideal of American jurisprudence out the window.

I am very worried that when the deportations do not go quickly enough to satisfy the Stephen Millers of the world (I don’t think that Trump himself much cares – he just thinks of it as a winning strategy to keep MAGA behind him), we’re going to see more and more extrajudicial actions and likely extrajudicial violence as well. I don’t think it would take a lot for Fox News to foment a pogrom against immigrant communities or for that good old American pastime, the lynching, to make a comeback. I hope I’m wrong but I’m feeling it in the air. The other community in extreme danger is the transexual community, a tiny and harmless minority. There are various legislative movements afoot which will eradicate their existence as human beings in the eyes of the law – very similar to Germany’s first moves against the Jews in the mid 1930s. And I don’t believe for one minute that the unleashed forces of MAGA and Dominionism will stop with the T in the LGBTQIA+ – they’re just the low hanging fruit as they have few defenders outside of the queer community. I’m starting to feel the target settling on my back as a gay man – but I lived through the last decades of the 20th century in that condition and I know how to handle it. The young uns with only 21st century experience are about to get an unpleasant education. If I have one piece of advice for young queer adults it’s to make some friends in older generations – you’re going to need them when things get worse.

Here’s to multiple targets: Gay man, openly critical of the administration in print, non-Christian, strong ethical and moral code. At least I’ll enjoy the other passengers in the boxcar.