Great TV

I keep expecting it to feel like it did in high school, circa 1983, when our AP Chemistry teacher instructed us that, if and when the nuclear war came, we should wade into the Long Island Sound because the water would protect our bodies from the radiation to some extent. Of course, our heads would still be exposed, and that didn’t seem so good.

Which always made me think of what our English teachers had made us read in junior high: On the Beach, a novel about survivors of a nuclear war, and how I kept thinking I’d really rather not survive that, thanks. And besides, it seemed so unlikely we’d survive it, given that we were on Long Island, where every second dad (including mine) was employed by the defense industry, a fact that put a giant red star on our spit of sand.

But it doesn’t feel like that. Instead, it feels to me as if I am epigenetically programmed to know that this is what my peasant Polish Catholic relatives felt in Poland as the war descended and it became clear that the Nazis versus the Russians, and the slaughter of the Jews among the more selective slaughter of the Catholics, would mean a brutal, protracted civil war in Poland, as everyone had to figure out with whom to ally to maybe survive.

It's the sense of having to think so keenly about survival.

For years my mother has said to me, as she recycles another big glass jar or large plastic juice container, “What we wouldn’t have given during the war to have had a container like this! To carry water!” And now, every time I recycle something that might be useful after the civil war breaks out, I think I will have regretted it.

But one must not hoard, for the other thing I know is that you will have to be mobile, on the run. That my mother had to run, many times, with her family across the fields and through the muddy swamp where they eeled, to the forest, because for some reason they didn’t usually bomb the forests.

I said to my son this afternoon, as we were discussing yesterday's scene at the White House (that ambush on Zelensky) that we’re going to need our son to make weapons. My spouse thought I meant that our son would have to move to scientific work that can be supported by the DOD rather than the NIH or NSF, because that’s the last place the money will still be available to young scientists like our son. But I told them I meant he would need to make weapons for us – to defend ourselves in the apocalypse.

My son replied that one thing science is very good for is learning all the ways you can accidentally kill yourself. He didn’t have to explain what his comment meant: that knowing what kills means knowing how to kill. Maybe not know mentally, but know scientifically. And he is an engineer.

I would say I can’t believe I’m at this point of this kind of thinking, but even before the election, I was lying awake at night about Ukraine and global warming and thinking we are fucked, and it’s all going to disintegrate into wars over food and water. And then he was elected. And then he was inaugurated. And everything since has been destruction and chaos and “great TV.”

It's quite clear what they’re doing: working to make the government not so much “efficient” to save the billionaires tax money but working to make the government truly wretched, so that people will come to hate the government ever more.

Because you won’t be able to reach anyone to help you with your social security payment or your tax refund. The national parks will degrade and the highways will become cratered with potholes and people will hate the government ever more.

And the Democrats will always be the party that believes in government. So you will keep hating the Dems, too, those mother-fuckers who get you healthcare and clean water and clean air.

The attack on the universities – all I can do is to circle constantly around the knowledge that when the Nazis came, one of the first things they did was to round up the Polish intelligentsia and murder most of them. You get rid of the people smart enough to know what is going on. Smart enough to organize.

Our old friend Alina was spared, at the age of 18, though she was from the intelligentsia, because she spoke five languages and they needed her in Germany as a translator. Alina used to recall to us how they would be marched around the fenced yard each day for fresh air, and how the German women used to come up to the fences and slip the prisoners little bits of food and fresh fruit, “And oh! To eat a piece of fresh fruit!”

I think we should plant raspberries. If only to attract the animals we can then capture for food.

There is a strange way in which thinking about survival in this way does awaken the spirit. But it is not a happy spirit. It is the cold druid, barefoot as my mother was during much of the war. (“You outgrew your shoes and there were no more shoes. I outgrew my clothes and there were no more clothes.”)

I think we might as well start holding grim cocktail parties and talking about resistance in a more overt way. Not the “resistance” of the first Trump administration, the pussy hats, the signs about how science is real. The resistance of war. To talk about how we can communicate without surveillance, and what direction the police might take and how to think about that. How to know who among us might be a mole.

The urge is to move north.

For a while I was thinking the fact that people in the universities weren’t openly panicking was a sign that maybe it was all going to be put back – USAID and clinical studies and the federal workforce. That it was just bluster and show, and that they would stop once they made a scene, as with Trump I. That they would have to heed the courts telling them to stop.

But now shit is very much more real. They don’t care about the courts. The Washington Post reported yesterday that at the Oval Office fiasco, the Associated Press was denied entry but somehow they let in a reporter for the Kremlin. The annual conference to decide how to engineer the flu vaccine for next year was cancelled. Predictable words (woman; black) are being banned from research. And the Department of Justice is sending "task forces" in to police campuses on the wrong side of Trump’s politics. (How’d that work out for ya, Dearborn?)

I spend a moment each day wondering what my job is. Is it to carry on and do the best I can from my location to fight for freedom of thought, inquiry, research, personhood, bodily autonomy? Or is it to shift to a kind of emergency mode, particularly where ascertainment and distribution of reality is concerned?

I go to the gym so often now, to burn off the stress. The repetition of sweaty jackknives and planks and curls takes the edge off, and I emerge feeling a little calmer. But with the calm comes the thought that it’s not a bad time to be ready to run, faster, and longer.