It’s birthday week again. Both dead husbands had birthdays the second week of April – Tommy on the 10th and Steve on the 13th. Tommy would be having a milestone this year, turning 60. I’m not sure he would have liked that. Steve would be turning 77 and I know he would have insisted that the years stopped somewhere around fifty something. He would never have admitted to being more then ten years into Medicare territory. I’m missing them, but as so much of them remain a part of me in one way or another, the emotional state of crossing this particular week is becoming, as the years roll on, more and more a time of counting my blessings that they were part of my life. Steve gave me the ability to be my authentic self and to stick with my moral center, no matter what was happening in the world. Tommy gave me the ability to balance my right and left brain selves. I’m spending this weekend performing with Tommy’s beloved Alabama Symphony Chorus, the one he browbeat me into joining. We’re singing Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Missa Brevis. Both gorgeous pieces that bridge the sacred and the secular and I can almost hear Tommy’s tenor in my ear. The last time I sang Chichester Psalms he was still alive and in the chorus with me and I remember us sitting at the dining room table working on Hebrew pronunciation together one night.
I’m a bit preoccupied with moral thinking at the moment as our political moment gets uglier and uglier, moving steadfastly from the realms of farce and incredulity to those of true moral evil. I can think of no other way to describe the administration’s handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case – transported to a gulag in El Salvador due to ‘administrative error’ and expressly against previous judicial orders and now the DOJ basically refusing to comply with repeated judge’s orders to repatriate him including a 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court. The executive’s refusal to follow the demands of the judicial and really no mechanism left by which that decision can be enforced shows how far we have sunk. Any one of us is ‘an administrative error’ away from a similar fate with no apparent recourse.
Another moral evil of the day is the Tump administration’s rescinding of federal moneys to repair the sewage situation in Lowndes county, one of the poorest places in Alabama (a poor state) and predominantly African American. Decades of state and societal neglect have led to a situation where the sewer lines from homes are basically emptying into yards. Federal money to put in proper sewer lines was yanked today under the excuse that providing it was due to DEI. Again, using a somewhat academic concept to effect bald faced discrimination obviously based in racial attitudes is, in my book, moral evil and inexcusable. Open sewers are a public health risk. As I have repeatedly said. Disease does not respect politics or socioeconomic status or privilege. Allowing disease to run rampant, which appears to be the new goal of the federal government, will hit us all. Tangentially, the CDC eliminated their arm which inspects cruise ships for health and infectious disease issues. This office was not paid for by the federal government but rather by the cruise industry itself by collected fees. So there’s no waste/fraud/abuse reasoning for this. I suspect strongly that a large corporate entity asked someone in the federal government to remove these fees and this is the result. Yet another example of our devolution back to a world where corporate profit trumps public health and safety. Given the rapidity in which norovirus and other goodies rocket through these enclosed systems, I’m not planning on joining 5000 of my closest friends in a floating tin can that hasn’t been inspected. You can make your own choices.
As I read through postings by well educated and liberal friends, I keep seeing vituperative anger at President Trump. It’s misdirected. He’s one person. Yes, he has tremendous power to set things in motion but he can’t be everywhere at once. And, given what I’ve seen of him over the years, he doesn’t have the ability or the attention to span to have come up with even a small percentage of the policies made in his name. Behind him are several hundred well educated, very wealthy, and intelligent individuals who are operating from a position of zealotry – some of it religious, some of it social, some of it political and behind them are tens of thousands of people who are actually moving destructive and detestable things forward. Some share in the ideology and feel like they are part of history. Some are doing it for a paycheck. Some are going along to get along. Some are scared that if they don’t do what they are asked that the negative powers of the current administration will be turned on them and theirs.
No matter what fuels them, or what angle they’re working – religious, social, or political – the current goal is an undoing of the last eighty years of social order defined by the liberal consensus that government should be there to protect the individual from the predations of capital and which has built a globalized economy and transnational political and social organizations. The operators of this system are the professional classes – those with advanced educations and the understanding of highly technical and sophisticated systems – of governance, science, economics and the like. They tend to have good incomes, live in desirable communities in coastal cities, and, in general, as the gatekeepers to societal riches, have had little understanding of the realities of those on lower rungs of the social ladder. I belong to this class and I suspect many of my readers do as well. They have been recast not as people to be emulated but as ‘the elites’ who must be pulled down in order for society to better serve those who have felt disenfranchised. In some ways we’re living in a rehash of the proletariat/bourgeoisie conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s that capped the industrial revolution.
There’s not going to be a wholesale decimation of professionals. We’d have a hard time keeping a hospital running without physicians or the power grid up without engineers but I think we’re going to see some targeted expunging to try and keep everyone else in line. Academics in social sciences like history and literature and political science, especially if they focus on ‘forbidden’ topics like gender and race are likely to be the first to suffer. There will also likely be a culling based on suspect class characteristics. Openly LGBTQIA, female, and ethnic minority individuals will be targets.
The administration is busy cancelling visas and deporting foreign students at US universities who have expressed opinions contrary to administration policy and goals. (This strikes me as being completely contrary to the first amendment but who am I?) The net result is going to be a major brain drain as foreign students go elsewhere for their advanced training. The money they bring to US schools will dry up. We won’t have the benefit of their talents. To use my own profession as an example. 25% of current US practicing US physicians were born and educated outside of the country. We already have a doctor shortage and we’ve been having to import for years to even begin to meet our needs. What happens when they don’t come? Lower the standards for admission to medical school to get more native born into training? And who is going to pay for the thirty or so more medical schools we would need to give capacity to have them trained?
I belong to two suspect classes. I’m openly gay and I have been openly critical of this administration’s policies for years in print (including in a couple of award winning books you might have read). I’m pretty sure I’m on someone’s list. Will I be watched? Will I be declared officially dead in the Social Security master file so that I cannot function in society? Will I be sent to a reeducation camp? I would rather not end my life in pain and misery in such a place but if that’s what it takes to show the world what moral evil is and to get people to do something about it, it’s a sacrifice I would be willing to make.
I do have a prediction regarding the LGBTQIA community. If the authoritarianism continues and there are no changes in the next few elections (I believe they will occur but that various things will prevent any change in regime), there will be a crackdown on gay men. It will likely take the form of protecting public health. There will be an outbreak of an STI in the gay community (similar to MPOX a few years ago) and that will be the excuse to try and break the power of the gay community and to make public declarations and display of male homosexuality illegal with drastic punishments for those who violate these proscriptions (in the name of protecting innocent children from diseased individuals). I hope I’m not right but it’s a very old and very effective playbook.
Alright, now I’m depressed and I’ve finished Season 3 of White Lotus so I’ll need to find something else to distract me from the moral evils of the world (not that there wasn’t plenty of moral evil happening at White Lotus Thailand…)
Life, The Universe, and Everything 