Ramble On: Sadness and the Sinking Ship (video)

Morning thoughts on the emotional aspects of the resistance

Here is today’s morning ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

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Good morning. As I am recording this, is Thursday evening at 7 PM, May the 15th. As you’re watching this, it is (probably) Friday morning, May 16th. So I don’t know what’s going to happen between 7 PM tonight and tomorrow morning. Many things are possible, Lord knows. This is a week in which, you know, we have a $400 million “palace in the skies” being given to the Trump Presidential Library—which I guess the Trump Presidential Library is the airplane at this point. Clever, clever workaround. Reminds me of when Alito said that sitting on the luxury private jet was like staying in a hotel for him. And we have the guy who is in charge of health in this country swimming in raw sewage with his grandkids. Doesn’t believe in vaccines, but swimming in raw sewage is okay. So that’s the level of madness that we’re at right now.

There’s a couple of things I want to discuss that aren’t necessarily news related. They’re more emotional, which I think is important to talk about because there’s a lot of new emotions that have come up—for me, certainly, and I think for lots of people that I talk to who are engaged in this fight, in this resistance, let’s call it what it is. And we run the gamut of emotions. This is—for people in the United States, for people who have the luxury of living in the United States and are my age, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, whatever—these are new feelings. This is a new situation. It is unprecedented in this country to be able to have to fight back against a tyrant. And that’s where we are. So I want to talk about that a little bit.

One of the things in the news is that the professors at Yale who study fascism—Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore and Jason Stanley—are all going to Canada. Yale University professors, who study fascism, have looked around here and they’re like, “We’re out.” And there was a quote in the New York Times, there was a video, but the quote, that Marcy Shore said, is, “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Talk about a canary in the coal mine! These canaries are flying to a different coal mine that isn’t run by a tyrant, okay? So I guess there was a lot of blowback that they’ve gotten on social media, this article when it ran in the Times, people giving them a hard time, you know, “Stay and fight,” and this sort of thing. So I want to read a post by Jessica Kale, who runs the Dirty Sexy History podcast, which is great. I’ve had her on my show before.

What the History of Abortion Can Teach Us About Project 2025

And she writes this:

And I think that’s a really good point. People are trying to figure out how to resist. And by people, I mean me, too. We’re all…I think everybody that’s plugged in, that understands what’s happening—which is not, alas, a majority of people in this country….we’re all figuring it out. It’s still a minority of people in the country that actually understands what’s happening right now and sees it for what it is. But we’re trying to figure out what to do, how to fight back, how to resist.

And there’s a lot of people on social media—I do this, too; it’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation—who say, “Well, if you resist, you should do this and you have to do that and you have to do this.” Like the people commenting on the Times post, how you can’t leave the country, you have to stay and fight, whatever. And I get why people are like that, because people are passionate, and they want to win, and they want to, you know, topple this tyrant before he really permanently ruins and ends democracy in this country. I get all that.

But I don’t think that there’s any one way to do it. I think there’s lots of different ways to resist, and I think all of them are important. And that’s one point that I want to make here. I said this before at some of the events: No one can do everything, but everyone must do something.

And something doesn’t have to be, you know, like Jessica said, grabbing your truncheon and going into the mosh pit with the Proud Boys or whatever. What Snyder and the other professors are doing is important. It will continue to be important wherever they are. And some people are going to resist in other ways. Some people are going to do the phone banks. Some people are going to go to all the marches. I’m going to continue to write about stuff and cover stuff in the way that I do. You know, that’s what I’m good at, so that’s what I’m going to do. And I think that if everybody does that, if everybody does something, eventually it will congeal and work. Certainly it’s better than doing nothing.

Because right now, the thing that worries me this week—I wrote about Qatar on Tuesday. It’s driving me crazy, by the way, to see all the bad information about the Qataris. It’s kind of funny that the MAGA accounts are all like, “They fund terrorism. How dare you take anything from them?” It’s much more complicated than that. But yet I don’t want to necessarily correct them since they’re slamming Trump.

Anyway, the fact that Trump is okay with just egregiously violating the Emoluments Clause, just egregiously violating it, not even pretending to hide the corruption at this point? The meme coin stuff that happened that was right before he took office: that’s just a way for hostile foreign powers to funnel money into his pockets. And that’s what it is. It’s a bribery mechanism, as I see it. You’ve got that. And now this thing with the plane, he’s going to accept the plane, and then he’s going to fly around in it. And then it’s going to go to his Library, which means he’s going to continue to use it. So it’s a gift to him of a $400 million airplane that by the way is probably bugged and has so many mics in it, you can’t even stand it, right?

So it’s bad on so many levels, but he doesn’t care. He’s so overt now. He’s so willing to be transparent about the corruption. And that’s what worries me because when you get to the point in these tyrannical situations where the tyrant just is open about what he’s doing, that comes from a position of perceived strength. So whether it’s true or not, Trump perceives himself as being very strong right now. And I think that’s dangerous. And I think we have to take that into account. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this kind of ramping up of the corruption comes at the same time that the professors who have written about fascism are leaving.

So yeah, we’ve got raw sewage, we’ve got groceries. Trump was explaining what groceries means when he’s on his Middle East tour—you know, as presidents do when visiting foreign countries. And then the business with the airplanes. Trump has his fancy airplanes. And meanwhile, at airports all across the country, first Newark, now Denver, there’s not enough air traffic controllers and the technology’s gone wonky—which is the fault of DOGE and this Duffy guy running the FAA. This is a guy who was on a reality show. He doesn’t have any experience at all. I could drive right now to the pizzeria down the street where I had my delicious dinner tonight and grab one of those guys and have him run the FAA. And I’m pretty convinced that the pizza guys would do a better job because the pizza guys know how to manage time. They know how to work under pressure. This Duffy guy doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even wear socks, you know, with a suit. We’re trusting him with this really important stuff.

Anyway, so that was one of the things I wanted to talk about. And the other one is, I saw this morning that Joyce Vance—who I don’t know personally; I follow her on the various accounts, I think she follows me on Blue Sky, but I’ve never interacted with her. But, you know, I like her. I follow her and I’m interested in what she has to say. She was, I believe, the former U.S. Attorney in Alabama. And this morning, or I guess yesterday morning, Wednesday, she wrote:

And I’m assuming she’s talking about the country, you know, because that tweet sums up how I feel. We’re trying hard and sometimes it is overwhelming and it’s sad. And I’m really glad that she said that because I think that people need to know that this is a normal way of feeling and that it will pass. It comes up, it comes down, but it’s normal to feel this way. Anybody that isn’t looking around at what’s happening now and feeling sad in some sort of way—sad for the harm and the suffering that’s being inflicted on people in this country, unnecessarily, just heartlessly by the people in charge; sad because so many people don’t see it or don’t care; and sad also because we’ve built this beautiful thing, this historical anomaly that is the United States, that is such a luxury. It’s such a luxury to live here and to have lived here and been born here and grown up here in this time period—you know, maybe the 19th century, not so much, but you know, in the late second half of the 20th century. And to be in a position where the country is strong. And there’s no wars that we’re involved in in any old school kind of way. And we have money, we have resources, we have political power, we have military power, we have science, we have art—all this stuff. And to ruin it, to sabotage it in the way that it’s being sabotaged. It’s really like, you know, some barbarian ruler comes in and doesn’t like the Library at Alexandria or whatever and destroys it, or doesn’t like the statue to whatever deity that they don’t believe in and destroys it, like the Taliban destroyed the twin Buddhas at Bamiyan. That’s what it’s like—except it’s not statues. It’s an entire society that we’ve painstakingly built over the last 250 years. And not from perfection—a lot of people suffered a lot to get to where we are now. And that’s sad too.

So I feel like Joyce Vance expressing the fact that she gets sad sometimes—I think it’s human. I think it’s normal in this day and age to feel that way. And I guess I just want to say I feel like that sometimes. I definitely feel that way this week. We’re taking off from The Five 8 tonight. We’re not doing the live show, although there will be a pre-recorded live show. So if you go onto the page at 8 o’clock, it’s going to start and there’s going to be a show and people can go in the chat room and hang out, because I know people like to do that, which is great.

But we’re not gonna do a live show. As it turns out, I actually had an actual plan. We’re going to a party tonight, Friday night. But even so, I needed the week off, I think. I think that, you know, I just needed to kind of retreat into my shell a little bit. And that’s okay, you know? It’s okay to do that. It’s okay for me to do it. It’s okay for you to do it.

This is hard stuff. This is a long battle. This isn’t a short term thing. I mean, even if something were to happen tomorrow, even if we impeached him tomorrow, Vance would still be the president. (JD, not Joyce. We should be so lucky that Joyce would be the president.) All of these people are still in the Cabinet. You know, we would still have the swimming and sewage guy running our health and the Republicans trying to cut Medicare and all this other stuff.

This is going to be a long process. If we can turn the ship around, if the ship isn’t the Titanic, if we can turn it around and avoid this iceberg that we’re merrily steaming right into—Trump’s the captain of the ship, but he’s like, “Great iceberg, love it.”

It’s sad. It’s a lot of different things, but it’s sad. So I wanted to talk about that.

I wanted to talk about the way that people resist and that everybody has different ways of resisting. And if somebody’s yelling at you on social media that you’re not doing X, Y, or Z, just tune that out. You can only do what you can do. As long as you’re doing something, it’s okay. And also it’s okay to be sad. These are sad times.

My cat is not sad. My cat is up here now on the windowsill. And, you know, cat doesn’t care who’s president, right? Yeah, she doesn’t care. Anyway, I hope that everybody has a great night and a lovely weekend. I hope we have good weather and I will see you all next week. Thanks for listening.

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ICYMI

The Age of Unreality, my essay collection that, in my opinion, is some of the best stuff I’ve ever written, is now out as an audiobook. It’s narrated by Kevin O’Brien, a veteran narrator of audiobooks, and he does such a fantastic job. Please check it out:

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