The Winter of Trump

It seemed fitting that the yellow hair with the tiny hands capable of annihilating the whole world would surface in the depths of winter darkness. January and February for me, as for many millions, equal darkness. Physical and spiritual. And where I live on the 48th parallel in France (about the same latitude as Duluth), thick river valley clouds turn the days still shorter and darker. What could be more appropriate than that with the scrawl of a photo-op pen these presidential hands would soon after make it legal for certified madmen to purchase military weapons to eliminate all of us whose skin and sex and regard they don't like. These hands who trained at the feet of the closet-case gangster attorney Roy Cohn have converted Murder Inc. into a drive-by franchise.

My qualifications for falling into their sites might seem to come from my generally celebratory books and reporting on homo sex life. For the moment this commander in chief has not issued such a direct order—daughter Ivanka apparently has too many homo pals in the fashion sector—but when he is shown the impeachment door, his rabid evangelical successor seems almost sure to sharpen the testicular knives. These are moderate concerns of the dreams that visit me at 3AM.

Greater anxieties, however, bordering on the terrain of trauma, circle and hover around roots: the roots I share with Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance. His people and many of mine in hardscrabble Kentucky are already being led blindly onto the slaughterhouse ramp, a ramp that until a year or so ago led them to cancer screening clinics, birth control counselors, and black lung care. All of that is set to give way very soon to the passive slaughterhouse now being constructed by all the tiny hands and tinier minds shuttling between Capital Hill and the smudged doorways known as the White House.

Recently a visitor to my and my husband's home in France lost patience one evening when the supper table talk turned to this impending hillbilly slaughter. "Maybe they shoulda worked harder in school and had the sense to get outta there. Stupid people get what they deserve! You didn't stay there, didja?" My first reaction was that I shouldn't have poured the guest such a large shot of bourbon. He couldn't have been serious. But he was. He ranted further about how he too had come from a family of dead-end workers in New Jersey but they'd had the gumption to get out and learn how to use computers.

Our New Jersey expat visitor wasn't altogether wrong. Many clever kids do see early on the necessity to escape as he had, serving in the Marines where he learned how to become a line cook and later hooked up with a well-paid international civil servant. Why didn't my and J.D.'s kindred do the same? The question is real and deserves reflection. J.D.'s much-celebrated book offers a partial answer. In certain parts of America, as in many parts of France, kinship and attachment to place count for more than ambition and health. The usual response is that in such places economic privation—no jobs, no roads, no doctors, no investment—propels the desperate into a spiral of ever deeper desperation, at which point they lurch at whatever salvation rope floats by. The latest of those illusory ropes has been tossed by the current White House occupant.

Right now, this year, many of the hillbilly grandchildren of the withered Great Society are busy. They are agitating and documenting what it is there that is worth saving—not just individual lives, but a still living culture that has not yet lost its sense of soul and community. If they have not left, it is because flight spells nothing less than the shredding of the collective soul where the the tiny-handed president's rescue ropes offer nothing more than nooses that will drag them into the final slaughterhouse. That is the darkest specter of today's trauma. And while I did escape long...