Also reminiscent of martial law Poland are White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s briefings with the press. I look at her with the same disbelief, scorn, and disgust as I did at the Polish military’s spokesman back in the day. But joining those emotions is sadness, for this is my country now, and it’s not under the control of a mighty communist neighbor, it’s ruled by a man who has no redeeming qualities as a human being, let alone as a leader.
Yesterday morning I took the car to the garage (hence my absence here) and then walked to the café, where I found my friend Dave sitting with his Wednesday morning coffee group. Talk was of current events.
“We now live in a dictatorship,” one of the men said. “That’s what Trump’s created.”
Walking back to the garage through Hardy Park I saw four people in white playing croquet. Even in a dictatorship, I thought, life goes on.
Though for one woman in Minneapolis yesterday it tragically ended.
I had a cartoon – the first of the new year – all ready to go and then current events intervened. The new one, which I posted about an hour ago, shows two men, one saying to the other: “Everyone thinks Trump’s obsession with Venezuela has to do with oil, forgetting that the country continually produces contenders for the Miss Universe title.”
I recently had lunch with a friend at Coconuts. Sitting on the outside terrace, we talked about the current situation in the country. Greg asked me if it reminded me of Poland in 1982.
“No,” I said. “Then everyone was affected. And everyone – with a very few exceptions – was against martial law.”
I looked around at the people in T-shirts and shorts, the Arnold Palmers and Bloody Marys, the Intracoastal gleaming behind them. “And you didn’t have this,” I said.
Since this is the week of quotes – John Cheever, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Matthiessen, the Florida Department of Transportation – I’ll end with one from Jan Morris, from her 1974 essay on Washington, DC:
“Capital of a violent nation, Washington is accustomed to violent values. Its general air is easygoing, but its bad men are truly bad, and brute force lies always near the heart of it.”
Trump is not a student – of history or anything – so he may be unaware of how his ICE raids on immigrants resemble the rounding up of Jews in Nazi Germany. There is the same racial profiling, the same absence of due process. That it is happening in the United States of America in the 21st Century is a national disgrace. Cities around the country should cancel their 4th of July fireworks out of a collective feeling of shame. Instead of celebration, we should observe a night of silence and opposition.