If you’re anything like me, you’ve been gazing slack-jawed at the news every day like you’re observing a very slow-moving meteor heading towards Connecticut.
And while this meteor’s path seems determined and very few of the things being hurled at it seem to be chipping away at its momentum, its shape is transforming at a disarming rate. One minute it’s a bird (coming down with the flu)! The next minute, it’s a plane (falling out of the sky)! Then, all of the sudden, it’s an ubermensch, issuing pink slips faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than the Constitution, and able to shutter tall government buildings with a single cringey tweet.
Our failure to forecast a livable future for future generations has led to a present in a chronology crisis, unable to figure out if we are in the middle of Neo-McCarthyism (“Have you now or have you ever been a member of a group that had pronouns in your email signature?”), post-reconstruction resettlement (pasting the word “DEI” over every civil rights achievement in order to reverse it), the Tammany Hall era (siphoning publicly allocated funds into the pockets of billionaires and offering open quid pro quos to accused criminals like Eric Adams) or the Gleichschaltung (look it up).
The latest executive decree finds President DonaldTrump and his would-be Attorney General Pam Bondi cosplaying as Judge Dredd and shouting “I am the law” loudly to any courtroom politely acknowledging that the constitution has very clearly and consistently said “HELL NO” to just about all of this. But when Sylvester Stallone, Trump’s “Special Ambassador to Hollywood” and the original Mr. Dredd himself, stars in the Daily Wire production of all this, will it be tragedy or farce? Depends on that meteor’s eventual impact, I suppose.
Elon Musk is hastening the end of America’s dinosaur reign in whatever way seems messiest and most preventable simply by being the world’s dumbest H.R. guy. Remember those wildfires from a few weeks ago? The ones that consumed other “Special Ambassador to Hollywood” Mel Gibson’s house while he was on Joe Rogan saying his dog’s heart dewormer cured cancer?
Say goodbye to all the park rangers and Interior department staff who could have helped L.A. and the rest of us prevent further forest fires. Musk, once hailed by the business press as a climate champion because he sold union-proof lithium battery-powered cars, is now doing everything he can to help Trump strip the planet for parts.
In addition to giving walking orders to hundreds of professionals at the EPA, he’s backing the self-anointed orange king in his quest to withdraw from the Paris accords, ban paper straws, and turn Greenland into an oil refinery colony. Maybe those who survive the great flood will find a copy of this ancient antediluvian op-ed and make sure that they don’t put all their survival eggs in the “green capitalism” bucket next time.
If laying off ecobureaucrats with an efficiency that would make McKinsey wet itself doesn’t do us in, don’t worry there’s a host of other departments who were barely keeping us afloat who are now taking their college degrees to the nearest Amazon Fulfillment Center. There are, of course, all those wasteful aviation eggheads who made sure planes didn’t flip over or explode. There’s the USDA folks foolishly blocking us from the herd immunity that comes from a healthy public exposure to new strains of bird flu.
The Office of Gun Violence Prevention has a name so opaque that it’s unclear what its purpose was, so thankfully it’s gone now too. Sure, USAID’s work sounds noble on paper, but why rebuild international infrastructure and prevent airborne illness when you can just build a border wall that surely terrorists and viruses will respect? And what could go wrong with a bunch of disgruntled nuclear scientists with high security clearance being told that regulation is so last year?
When President Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, at least he had an arsenal of scabs lined up to take their place. Now, the accidental Nazi and his 4chan apostles are scrambling to rehire essential staff to make sure their janky house of cards doesn’t collapse. Even a first year libertarian PoliSci major knows that neoliberal capitalism is only able to function when a robust state is able to subsidize the private sector’s many inefficiencies, but that memo never got passed on to the guy with the failing casino business or the guy who spent $44 billion so he could make “comedy legal” again and ban trigger words like “cisgender” from his favorite message board.
If this were a peaceful campus demonstration, Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries would be pulling out all the stops to end it, but instead it’s a palace coup. So many in the opposition party are miming resistance while trying not to get their suits dirty. Now is not the time for quiet-quitting though.
Thankfully, some of our U.S. Reps. like Chris Murphy and Rosa DeLauro are pissed and proactive. We the people still have a few powerful tools, namely our labor, our time, our voice and the thing the oligarchs care most about- our wallets. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., we can use those things constructively or destructively.
We also have numbers. If we line up to meet this moment, we can prevent the worst of the meteor’s blow. This may require sacrifice and some transformations of our own, but maybe we’ll still have a democracy by the end of it.
Timothy Gabriele lives in North Haven.